Before RL we typically SFT on human reasoning traces. This makes the reasoning traces somewhat coherent and the model trains faster.
But you don’t have to do that. You can skip straight to RL. If you do, the model will generate complete garbage reasoning traces before generating the correct answer. In fact, if you add a coherence reward to the reasoning trace, the model will perform worse (since you’re now diluting the correctness reward).
But you don’t have to do that. You can skip straight to RL. If you do, the model will generate complete garbage reasoning traces before generating the correct answer. In fact, if you add a coherence reward to the reasoning trace, the model will perform worse (since you’re now diluting the correctness reward).