DataFlex-RL: An Evaluation Platform for RLVR Data Policies
TL;DR
DataFlex-RL, an evaluation platform for comparing choices under a common GRPO recipe, is introduced, finding that changing the data policy measurably changes the training process but does not produce a reproducible improvement over uniform training.
Abstract
Data policies for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) determine which rollouts are used, how strongly they are weighted, and which domains contribute to subsequent training batches. We introduce DataFlex-RL, an evaluation platform for comparing these choices under a common GRPO recipe. Our primary experiment evaluates 13 configurations across 12 matched seeds using Qwen2.5-7B-Base and 12 mathematics, logic, and science benchmarks. Uniform GRPO improves the domain-balanced average accuracy by 7.76 percentage points over the untrained checkpoint. None of the eight rollout-selection or reweighting methods achieves a paired 95% confidence interval that excludes zero relative to uniform sampling, and none of the three adaptive mixtures outperforms a fixed equal mixture at the same level of precision. A corrected 12-seed extension on Llama-3.1-8B-Base places the additional methods on the same score scale as the original controls, but does not reveal a consistent winner in terms of observed mean performance. We also quantify evaluation sensitivity by rescoring nine Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct runs using a math-heavy six-benchmark summary, consisting of five mathematics benchmarks and GPQA-Diamond but no logic benchmark, and comparing it with the domain-balanced 12-benchmark summary. The resulting rankings are negatively correlated, with a correlation coefficient of -0.33, whereas summaries that retain all 12 benchmarks largely agree. Across the controlled settings studied here, changing the data policy measurably changes the training process but does not produce a reproducible improvement over uniform training.
