融合知识蒸馏与强化学习,提升大模型推理效率与泛化能力
KDRL: Post-Training Reasoning LLMs via Unified Knowledge Distillation and Reinforcement Learning
- 统一框架同时优化教师监督与自我探索
- 在多个推理任务上超越纯强化学习与蒸馏方法
- 适合需要高效推理且泛化性强的场景
近期大语言模型后训练研究通过强化学习(RL)和知识蒸馏(KD)两种范式提升推理能力。尽管RL能催生复杂推理行为,但初始策略难以探索高回报路径时样本效率低下;而KD虽提升学习效率,却在域外场景泛化性差。本文提出KDRL,一种联合优化推理模型的统一后训练框架,同时利用教师监督(KD)与自探索(RL)。具体地,通过策略梯度优化,同时最小化学生与教师分布间的反向KL散度(RKL),并最大化基于规则的奖励。我们构建统一目标,系统分析不同KL近似方式、系数及奖励引导蒸馏策略对训练动态与性能的影响。实验表明,KDRL在多个推理基准上优于GRPO及多种KD基线,在性能与推理令牌效率间取得良好平衡。结果表明,融合KD与RL是训练推理型大模型的有效高效策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent advances in large language model (LLM) post-training have leveraged two distinct paradigms to enhance reasoning capabilities: reinforcement learning (RL) and knowledge distillation (KD). While RL enables the emergence of complex reasoning behaviors, it often suffers from low sample efficiency when the initial policy struggles to explore high-reward trajectories. Conversely, KD improves learning efficiency via mimicking the teacher model but tends to generalize poorly to out-of-domain scenarios. In this work, we present \textbf{KDRL}, a \textit{unified post-training framework} that jointly optimizes a reasoning model through teacher supervision (KD) and self-exploration (RL). Specifically, KDRL leverages policy gradient optimization to simultaneously minimize the reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL) between the student and teacher distributions while maximizing the expected rule-based rewards. We first formulate a unified objective that integrates GRPO and KD, and systematically explore how different KL approximations, KL coefficients, and reward-guided KD strategies affect the overall post-training dynamics and performance. Empirical results on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that KDRL outperforms GRPO and various KD baselines while achieving a favorable balance between performance and reasoning token efficiency. These findings indicate that integrating KD and RL serves as an effective and efficient strategy to train reasoning LLMs.
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