Our goal is to explore the potential of LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data, focusing on their self-evolution through a pure RL process.
we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates a small amount of cold-start data and a multi-stage training pipeline. Specifically, we begin by collecting thousands of cold-start data to fine-tune the DeepSeek-V3-Base model. Following this, we perform reasoning-oriented RL like DeepSeek-R1- Zero. Upon nearing convergence in the RL process, we create new SFT data through rejection sampling on the RL checkpoint, combined with supervised data from DeepSeek-V3 in domains such as writing, factual QA, and self-cognition, and then retrain the DeepSeek-V3-Base model. After fine-tuning with the new data, the checkpoint undergoes an additional RL process, taking into account prompts from all scenarios. After these steps, we obtained a checkpoint referred to as DeepSeek-R1, which achieves performance on par with OpenAI-o1-1217.
Aha Moment of DeepSeek-R1-Zero A particularly intriguing phenomenon observed during the training of DeepSeek-R1-Zero is the occurrence of an “aha moment”. This moment, as illustrated in Table 3, occurs in an intermediate version of the model. During this phase, DeepSeek-R1-Zero learns to allocate more thinking time to a problem by reevaluating its initial approach. This behavior is not only a testament to the model’s growing reasoning abilities but also a captivating example of how reinforcement learning can lead to unexpected and sophisticated outcomes.
