Effort-conditioned reward

Effort-conditioned reward

Centre in the subgroup

×

no parameters

Within one prompt at one effort the rewards are mean-centered: a response is measured against the others written at the same effort.

in
RR [B batch, |𝔅|, M]
out
AA [B batch, |𝔅|, M]

The report says this in words (“rewards are mean-centered to compute group-relative advantages”) and writes no formula for it.

Sources1

Direct evidence

§5.1.4, Controllable Reasoning Effort in RL: a scalar effort b ∈ {1, …, 100} is prepended to the system prompt. For each prompt x, M_b responses are sampled at each effort level b ∈ B (eq. 8). Responses sharing (x, b) form a subgroup, within which rewards are mean-centered to compute group-relative advantages. A length-penalty term is added to the reward: −min{C_max, k(b)·ℓ/L_norm} (eq. 9), with k(b) = k₀·exp(−(b − b_min)/τ), τ = λ·Δb̄, Δb̄ the average spacing between the training effort levels (eq. 10).

effort · deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash / DeepSeek_V41_Tech_Report.pdf
Pinned revision 2cba9e42aa02 ↗ · p. 29