让大模型强化学习用上旧数据,训练效率提升超450倍。
Squeeze the Soaked Sponge: Efficient Off-policy Reinforcement Finetuning for Large Language Model
- 提出ReMix方法,让原本只能用新数据的强化微调支持旧数据复用。
- 1.5B模型仅用0.079万次推理就达52.10%准确率,7B模型用0.011万次达64.39%。
- 适合追求高效、低成本强化微调的LLM研究者和开发者。
强化学习在提升大语言模型推理能力方面展现出潜力,但现有强化微调方法多为在线策略,无法充分利用历史生成数据,导致计算与时间成本高昂。为此,本文重启离线策略强化学习,提出通用方法ReMix,使PPO、GRPO等在线策略方法能有效利用离线数据。ReMix包含三部分:(1) 提高更新-数据比(UTD)的混合策略近端策略梯度;(2) 基于KL凸性的策略约束,平衡稳定与灵活;(3) 策略重生机制,实现从早期高效学习到渐进稳定优化的无缝过渡。实验中,基于PPO、GRPO及1.5B、7B基础模型,ReMix在五个数学推理基准(AIME'24、AMC'23、Minerva、OlympiadBench、MATH500)上分别取得52.10%(1.5B,0.079M响应采样,350步)、63.27%/64.39%(7B,0.007M/0.011M采样,50/75步)的平均通过率。相比15个近期先进模型,训练成本降低30至450倍。分析还揭示了离线偏差引发的短回答偏好、严重离线性下自我反思行为崩溃等现象。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). One major limitation of most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods is that they are on-policy RL in nature, i.e., data generated during the past learning process is not fully utilized. This inevitably comes at a significant cost of compute and time, posing a stringent bottleneck on continuing economic and efficient scaling. To this end, we launch the renaissance of off-policy RL and propose Reincarnating Mix-policy Proximal Policy Gradient (ReMix), a general approach to enable on-policy RFT methods like PPO and GRPO to leverage off-policy data. ReMix consists of three major components: (1) Mix-policy proximal policy gradient with an increased Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio for efficient training; (2) KL-Convex policy constraint to balance the trade-off between stability and flexibility; (3) Policy reincarnation to achieve a seamless transition from efficient early-stage learning to steady asymptotic improvement. In our experiments, we train a series of ReMix models upon PPO, GRPO and 1.5B, 7B base models. ReMix shows an average Pass@1 accuracy of 52.10% (for 1.5B model) with 0.079M response rollouts, 350 training steps and achieves 63.27%/64.39% (for 7B model) with 0.007M/0.011M response rollouts, 50/75 training steps, on five math reasoning benchmarks (i.e., AIME'24, AMC'23, Minerva, OlympiadBench, and MATH500). Compared with 15 recent advanced models, ReMix shows SOTA-level performance with an over 30x to 450x reduction in training cost in terms of rollout data volume. In addition, we reveal insightful findings via multifaceted analysis, including the implicit preference for shorter responses due to the Whipping Effect of off-policy discrepancy, the collapse mode of self-reflection behavior under the presence of severe off-policyness, etc.
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