README
Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data
🎉 News •
🔗 Links •
📝 Roadmap •
⚙️ Algorithm Flow •
📊 Results
✨ Getting Started •
🏋️ Training •
🔧 Usage •
📃 Evaluation
🎈 Citation •
🌻 Acknowledgement •
📧 Contact •
📈 Star History
⚠️WARNING⚠️: New Qwen3 base models have untrained token embeddings, we used
python absolute_zero_reasoner/utils/remove_think_qwen3_tokenizer.py --model_nameto remove these tokens or else the model produces nonsense.
🚧UNDER TESTING🚧 This new merge to
mainis still under testing. Use thepaperbranch to replicate results from original paper.
- [2025/06/30] We now support Sandbox-Fusion as executor, just put
azr.executor=sandboxfusionin training configs. Officially completed our initial roadmap. - [2025/06/28] We now support new version of veRL, use the
paperbranch to reproduce the paper results with static copy of veRL. Themainbranch will now be regularly updated with the latest veRL versions. - [2025/06/01] We release code for evals
- [2025/05/06] We present the Absolute Zero Reasoner [Project Page | Paper | Code | Model(s) | Logs].
🔗 Links
- 🏠 [Project Page]
- 📜 [Paper]
- 🤗 [Models]
- 💻 [Code]
- 📁 [Logs]
📝 Roadmap
✅
Release training code
✅
Release evaluation code
✅
Update veRL
✅
Upgrade Python executor
⚙️ Algorithm Flow
Our approach centers on a repeated iterative process of the following two steps:
-
PROPOSE: The model generates reasoning tasks from abduction, deduction, and induction types. Tasks are validated with Python execution and assigned a learnability reward.
-
SOLVE: The model then attempts to solve these self-generated tasks. Solutions are verified through Python execution, receiving an accuracy reward.
The model continuously improves through both phases using TRR++, creating a self-evolving loop that strengthens reasoning without external training data.
📊 Results
Main Results
Our approach achieves strong performance across both code and math reasoning benchmarks without using any external data:
Model
Base
#data
Code Avg
Math Avg
Total Avg
Base Models
Qwen2.5-7B
-
-
52.0
27.5
39.8
Qwen2.5-7B-Ins
-
-
56.3
37.0
46.7
Qwen2.5-7B-Coder
-
-
56.6
23.9
40.2
Reasoners Trained on Curated Code Data
AceCoder-RM
Ins
22k
58.3
37.4
47.9
AceCoder-RM
Coder
22k
57.3
27.5
42.4
AceCoder-Rule
Ins
22k
55.4
36.9
46.2
AceCoder-Rule
Coder
22k
60.0
28.5
44.3
CodeR1-LC2k
Ins
2k
60.5
35.6
48.0
CodeR1-12k
Ins
10k
61.3
33.5
47.4
Reasoners Trained on Curated Math Data
PRIME-Zero
Coder
484k
37.2
45.8
41.5
SimpleRL-Zoo
Base
8.5k
54.0
38.5
46.3
Oat-Zero
Math
8.5k
45.4
44.3
44.9
ORZ
Base
57k
55.6
41.6
48.6
Absolute Zero Training w/ No Curated Data (Ours)
AZR (Ours)
Base
0
55.2 +3.2
38.4 +10.9
46.8 +7.0
AZR (Ours)
Coder
0
61.6 +5.0
39.1 +15.2
50.4 +10.2
Scaling Results
AZR shows consistent improvements across model sizes and types:
Model Family
Variant
Code Avg
Math Avg
Total Avg
Llama3.1-8b
28.5
3.4
16.0
Llama3.1-8b
+ AZR (Ours)
31.6 +3.1
6.8 +3.4
19.2 +3.2
Qwen2.5-3B Coder
51.2
18.8
35.0
Qwen2.5-3B Coder
+ AZR (Ours)
54.9 +3.7
26.5 +7.7
40.7 +5.7
Qwen2.5-7B Coder
56.6
23.9
40.2
Qwen2.5-7B Coder
+ AZR (Ours)
61.6 +5.0
39.1 +15.2
50.4 +10.2
Qwen2.5-14B Coder
60.0
20.2
40.1
Qwen2.5-14B Coder
+ AZR (Ours)
63.6 +3.6
43.0 +22.8
53.3 +13.2
✨ Getting Started
🎄 Environment Setup
conda env create -f azr_env.yml
conda activate azr
pip install -r flashattn_requirements.txt
💾 Data Processing
Process evaluation data on CruxEval / LiveCodeBench Execution during AZR Self-play
python -m absolute_zero_reasoner.data_construction.process_code_reasoning_data
🏋️ Training
⚠️WARNING⚠️: The Python executor in this repository is very raw and intended for research purposes only. It is not secure for production environments. We plan to update our executor to more secure implementations in the future. Your use of our code is at your own discretion and risk.
🫛 Seeding (Optional)
We provide the seed datasets we collected by prompting each model in data/. If you want to create your own seed data, use the following script:
export OUTPUT_SEED_PATH=data/.jsonl
export OUTPUT_CODE_F_SEED_PATH=data/.jsonl
bash scripts/seeding/.sh
♟️ Self-play
3b models need 2 X 80gb GPUs, 7/8b models need 4 X 80gb, 14b requires 8 X 80gb
bash scripts/selfplay/.sh
If you want to use your own ded/abd or ind seed dataset:
export OUTPUT_SEED_PATH=data/.jsonl
export OUTPUT_CODE_F_SEED_PATH=data/.jsonl
bash scripts/selfplay/.sh
For using the newly supported sandbox-fusion executor, use docker and set azr.executor=sandboxfusion.
🌚 Resuming Runs
When resuming runs, put the original run wandb id into the script, i.e., trainer.wandb_run_id=.
🤗 Converting veRL checkpoints to HF format
python -m absolute_zero_reasoner.utils.convert2hf \
/actor \
/actor/huggingface/ \
📈Design Your Own Intrinsic Rewards!
In configs, just add your own rewards to azr.reward.generation_reward_config, check the ones already implemented such as diversity and complexity rewards. Be Creative!
🔧 Usage
We use the Deepseek R1 & tags as prompt template:
A conversation between User and Assistant. The user asks a question, and the Assistant solves it. The assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the user with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within and tags, respectively, i.e., reasoning process here answer here . User: {question}\nAssistant:
📃 Evaluation Code
LiveCodeBench
Setup: LCB needs to first download the data
git clone https://hf-mirror.com/datasets/livecodebench/code_generation_lite evaluation/code_eval/coding/LiveCodeBench/code_generation_lite
Evaluation:
bash evaluation/code_eval/scripts/run_lcb_gen.sh --model
Evalplus
New conda env is neede for evalplus
conda create -n evalplus python=3.11
pip install --upgrade "evalplus[vllm] @ git+https://github.com/evalplus/evalplus@d362e933265c3e7e3df8101c930a89c3c470cd9f"
Evaluation:
```bash
condda activate evalplus
bash evaluation/code_eval/scripts/run_evalplus.sh 0
Math
Please refer to evaluation/math_eval/README.md for math evaluation.
🎈 Citation
If you find Absolute Zero Reasoner helpful, please cite us.
@misc{zhao2025absolutezeroreinforcedselfplay,
title={Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data},
author={Andrew Zhao and Yiran Wu and Yang Yue and Tong Wu and Quentin Xu and Yang Yue and Matthieu Lin and Shenzhi Wang and Qingyun Wu and Zilong Zheng and Gao Huang},
year={2025},
eprint={2505.03335},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.LG},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03335},
}
🌻 Acknowledgement
Our reinforcement learning training codebase is a fork of the veRL framework. For rollouts, we used vLLM. The Python executor components are adapted from the QwQ Repository. Additionally, we borrowed our README structure from PRIME.
Many thanks to the authors of these projects for their excellent contributions!
📧 Contact
Feel free to contact Andrew Zhao via email: [email protected]