用重加权监督微调简化强化学习对齐,提升稳定性与效率
RLHF in an SFT Way: From Optimal Solution to Reward-Weighted Alignment
- 将对齐目标转为可离线执行的重加权SFT,避免在线采样
- 在帮助性与无害性上比DPO平均提升7.16%,训练更稳定
- 相比GRPO提速超5倍,适合追求高效对齐的工程应用
强化学习从人类反馈(RLHF)对齐大语言模型至关重要,但其高复杂度和计算开销长期制约应用。现有方法如PPO、GRPO依赖在线采样,而DPO虽为离线方案仍存在过拟合与训练不稳定问题。本文提出基于变分推断的新方法:变分重加权对齐(VAR),直接最小化模型策略与最优解之间的分布差距,将对齐目标转化为仅需微调SFT损失的离线重加权监督微调形式。在多个基准测试中,该方法显著优于离线对齐方法,帮助性与无害性指标平均提升7.16%;相较在线采样方法,性能相当甚至更优,同时计算开销大幅降低,收敛速度超过GRPO的5倍,为高效高质的模型对齐提供了新路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption, specifically for online sampling-based methods like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Even with recent simplifications, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that designs an offline implicit reward learning objective relying on pre-collected preference datasets, the problems of over-fitting and training instability remain hindering the alignment process from the expected optimal performance. To address the existing challenges, we propose a novel simplification of RLHF from the perspective of variational inference, called Variational Alignment with Re-weighting (VAR). Specifically, by directly minimizing the distribution gap between the learning LLM policy and the optimal solution of RLHF, we transform the alignment objective into an offline reward-driven re-weighted supervised fine-tuning (SFT) form, which only requires minor adjustment on the SFT loss to obtain noticeable improvement on training stability and effectiveness. In comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, our objective empowers LLMs to outperform offline alignments, demonstrating superior performance in both helpfulness and harmlessness metrics (avg. $\uparrow7.16\%$ than DPO). Meanwhile, when compared to online sampling methods, our method is also comparable even better while significantly reducing computational overhead and accelerating convergence speed (over $5\times$ faster than GRPO), suggesting our approach as an efficient and effective solution in bridging the gap between efficiency and performance in LLM alignment.
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