Bo Liu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven recent progress in reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) by enabling large-scale optimization. However, its applicability remains largely limited to domains such as mathematics and coding, where correctness can be deterministically verifiable. Open-ended tasks instead often rely on human preferences, reward models, or LLM-based judges, introducing evaluation bias, judge capability bottlenecks, and additional inference costs. Drawing on the principle of self-supervised learning, which constructs pretext tasks to derive supervision from the data itself, we propose **Reinforcement Learning with Self-Verifiable Rewards (RLSVR)**, a task-transformation-based training paradigm for extending RLVR to open-ended tasks. RLSVR transforms open-ended tasks into verifiable proxy environments whose internal rules and interaction outcomes automatically generate reward signals. We instantiate RLSVR with **SpyRL**, a **S**elf-**P**la**Y** **R**einforcement **L**earning method inspired by social deduction game *Who Is the Spy?*. Agents receive asymmetric information, complete the same target task, and vote to identify a designated spy. Because the spy identity is predetermined, voting outcomes provide fully verifiable rewards, while successful identification remains closely related to output quality. Experiments on text summarization, creative writing, and mathematical reasoning show that SpyRL outperforms existing self-improvement methods on non-verifiable tasks and yields consistent gains on verifiable reasoning tasks. These results demonstrate that task transformation can extend scalable RLVR-based self-improvement beyond inherently verifiable domains. Models and code have been released at https://github.com/wangqinsi1/RLSVR/tree/SpyRL.

Crowdsourced evaluation platforms such as Chatbot Arena enable real-time human assessment of model responses, but evaluating LLM-generated code remains challenging due to long outputs and the need to reason about execution behavior. We introduce BigCodeArena, an open human evaluation platform for code generation with an on-the-fly execution backend. BigCodeArena executes LLM-generated code and allows humans to interact directly with execution processes and outcomes. We collect over 14K code-centric conversations across 10 widely used LLMs, spanning 10 programming languages and 8 execution environments, including more than 4.7K multi-turn samples with pairwise human preferences. Our analysis reveals fine-grained preferences across tasks, languages, and frameworks. With the collected data, we construct two benchmarks: BigCodeReward, which measures alignment between reward models and human preferences, and AutoCodeArena, an automated Elo-style benchmark for code generation. Results show that execution feedback improves preference modeling, and that proprietary models such as GPT-5 and Claude-4 variants remain strong performers.