提出不对称REINFORCE,让强化学习更专注正向奖励
Asymmetric REINFORCE for off-Policy Reinforcement Learning: Balancing positive and negative rewards
- 用可调基线控制正负奖励权重,聚焦高回报样本
- 理论证明基线低于期望奖励时策略可改进
- 适合大模型对齐,提升离策略强化学习效果
强化学习在对齐大语言模型中日益重要。离策略方法比在线策略方法实现更简单、数据效率更高,但通常表现不佳。本文研究介于离策略强化学习与监督微调之间的算法,分析一种简单的离策略REINFORCE算法,其中优势定义为 $A=r-V$,$r$ 为奖励,$V$ 为可调基线。直观上,降低 $V$ 可突出高奖励样本,提高 $V$ 则更严厉惩罚低奖励样本。我们首先提供该离策略REINFORCE算法的理论分析,表明当基线 $V$ 低于期望奖励时,算法具有策略改进保证。分析揭示:在线策略更新可安全利用正负信号,而离策略更新应更侧重正向奖励。我们在受控的随机老虎机设置及主流大模型推理任务微调中验证了上述发现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In this work, we study the intermediate range of algorithms between off-policy RL and supervised fine-tuning by analyzing a simple off-policy REINFORCE algorithm, where the advantage is defined as $A=r-V$, with $r$ a reward and $V$ some tunable baseline. Intuitively, lowering $V$ emphasizes high-reward samples, while raising it penalizes low-reward ones more heavily. We first provide a theoretical analysis of this off-policy REINFORCE algorithm, showing that when the baseline $V$ lower-bounds the expected reward, the algorithm enjoys a policy improvement guarantee. Our analysis reveals that while on-policy updates can safely leverage both positive and negative signals, off-policy updates benefit from focusing more on positive rewards than on negative ones. We validate our findings experimentally in a controlled stochastic bandit setting and through fine-tuning state-of-the-art LLMs on reasoning tasks.
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