arXiv:2501.03262cs.CLcs.LG2025-01被引 98

提出全局优势归一化,让无评论器强化学习更稳定高效

REINFORCE++: Stabilizing Critic-Free Policy Optimization with Global Advantage Normalization

  • 用全批量全局归一化替代局部归一化,提升优势估计精度
  • 在复杂推理任务中超越PPO和现有无评论器方法,稳定性显著提升
  • 适合需要高稳定性的大模型对齐场景,如复杂智能体任务

基于人类反馈的强化学习(RLHF)在对齐大语言模型(LLMs)中起关键作用。主流算法近端策略优化(PPO)依赖评论器网络估计优势,带来显著计算与内存开销。为此,一系列无评论器算法(如GRPO、RLOO)应运而生。然而,这些方法通常采用提示级(局部)优势归一化,存在优势估计不准、易过拟合的问题,且本文证明其为有偏估计。为此,我们提出REINFORCE++,核心是全局优势归一化:将优势值在整个全局批次上归一化,而非按小提示组进行。该方法提供更稳定、理论更可靠的近似无偏估计(偏差随批次增大趋近于零)。我们提出两个变体:适用于通用领域RLHF的REINFORCE++(k ≥ 1),以及针对复杂推理任务的鲁棒分组采样变体REINFORCE++/w baseline(k > 1)。实证表明,各变体在对应领域均表现更优,稳定性更强,甚至在复杂代理设置中超越PPO。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback~(RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning Large Language Models~(LLMs). The dominant algorithm, Proximal Policy Optimization~(PPO), employs a critic network to estimate advantages, which introduces significant computational and memory overhead. To address this, a family of critic-free algorithms (e.g., GRPO, RLOO) has emerged. However, these methods typically rely on \textit{prompt-level (local)} advantage normalization, which suffers from inaccurate advantage estimation, a tendency to overfit, and, as we show, is a theoretically biased estimator. To solve these challenges, we introduce REINFORCE++, a critic-free framework centered on \textbf{Global Advantage Normalization}. By normalizing advantages across the entire global batch rather than small, prompt-specific groups, our method provides a more stable and theoretically sound, \textit{effectively unbiased} estimate (whose bias vanishes as batch size increases). We introduce two variants: REINFORCE++, a highly efficient and general algorithm ($k \ge 1$) for general-domain RLHF, and REINFORCE++ /w baseline, a robust group-sampling variant ($k > 1$) for complex reasoning tasks. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that each variant shows superior stability and performance in its respective domain, outperforming existing methods and even PPO in complex agentic settings.

强化学习大模型对齐无评论器优势归一化

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