Indic-Task Gains and Regressions after Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2611.16228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We run reinforcement learning (RL) with GRPO across four environments, starting from a supervised fine-tuned 30B-A3B mixture-of-experts model covering English and eight Indic languages. We compare the model before and after RL across 34 benchmarks in one evaluation campaign. MATH improves by 36.07 points, and most Indic benchmarks also improve. Yet XQuAD-Indic F1 falls 19.32 points as English answers rise from 8.7% to 91.7%; IndicQA falls 8.64, while English XQuAD gains 11.71 F1. A second RL run from the same supervised initialization adds an Indic environment together with language and repetition rewards. Compared with the released model, it improves both passage-answering and instruction-following benchmarks, along with preserving MATH performance. But it loses ground on reasoning and coding benchmarks. Several training choices changed together, so we cannot isolate the effect of any one of the reward terms. Script compliance remains unresolved. Adding a language reward did not ensure use of the requested script. Passage answering and script compliance therefore need direct evaluation, even when other benchmark scores improve.