Oct 10, 2025, cs.LGJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Xinyi Wang, Jinyi Han, Zishang Jiang, Tingyun Li+6
School of Data Science, Fudan University · 2Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Education, East China Normal University · College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University+1
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key driver for enhancing the long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevalent methods like GRPO often fail when task difficulty exceeds model capacity, leading to reward sparsity and inefficient training. Prior work attempts to mitigate this with off-policy data, but such methods often induce severe distributional mismatches that destabilize policy updates. In this work, we identify a core issue underlying these failures, which we term low training affinity, and introduce Affinity, the first quantitative metric for monitoring the compatibility between external guidance and the model's intrinsic policy. To address this, we propose HINT, an adaptive framework designed to enhance reasoning capabilities while explicitly preserving high Affinity. First, instead of revealing partial answers, HINT supplies Meta-Hints, which act as abstract cognitive scaffolding to guide the model in articulating solutions independently. Second, to ensure stability, we integrate Affinity-Aware Policy Optimization (AAPO), which dynamically modulates the learning objective based on the Affinity. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that HINT consistently outperforms strong baselines, while exhibiting superior stability and robust generalization to out-of-distribution tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ViviqwerAsd/HINT.