arXiv:2507.08182cs.LG2025-07被引 16

用强化学习建模思维过程,让大模型更系统地探索解题路径。

CTRLS: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Latent State-Transition

  • 将思维链建模为隐状态转移的马尔可夫决策过程
  • 在多个基准任务上提升推理准确率与路径多样性
  • 无需微调大模型即可实现更鲁棒的推理探索

思维链(CoT)推理使大语言模型能够将复杂问题分解为可解释的中间步骤,显著提升模型透明度与推理性能。然而,传统CoT方法依赖启发式采样,缺乏对推理过程转移的结构化建模,限制了其系统性探索和发现多样化、高效推理路径的能力。本文提出CTRLS框架,将CoT推理建模为具有隐状态转移的马尔可夫决策过程(MDP),通过分布强化学习实现有原则的状态感知探索。通过在隐空间中显式建模推理动作的概率分布,该方法明确刻画了认知不确定性,促进对推理空间的稳健探索。作为框架核心,我们引入一种基于epsilon-greedy探索与熵正则化的在线策略强化学习策略,可在不微调底层LLM的前提下迭代优化隐状态转移。理论分析提供了证据下界(ELBO),为隐式推理动态的转移感知建模提供理论支撑。实验表明,该方法在多个基准推理任务上均实现了推理准确率、路径多样性和探索效率的提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional CoT methods rely on heuristic sampling without structured modeling of reasoning transitions, constraining their ability to systematically explore and discover diverse and effective reasoning trajectories. In this work, we introduce CTRLS, a framework that formulates CoT reasoning as a Markov decision process (MDP) with latent state transitions, enabling principled and state-aware exploration via distributional reinforcement learning. By modelling reasoning actions as explicit probability distributions in latent space, our approach explicitly models epistemic uncertainty, facilitating robust exploration of the reasoning space. As part of our framework, we introduce an on-policy reinforcement learning strategy incorporating epsilon-greedy exploration and entropy-based regularization to iteratively refine latent state transitions without requiring additional fine-tuning of the underlying LLM. Theoretical analyses provide evidence lower bounds (ELBO), theoretically grounding our transition-aware modeling of latent reasoning dynamics. Further experiments demonstrate improvements in reasoning accuracy, diversity, and exploration efficiency across benchmark reasoning tasks.

思维链强化学习推理建模

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