发现大模型数学推理性能被数据污染误导,真实效果需用干净数据重验。
Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination
- 用自动生成的无泄露算术题验证模型,排除训练数据污染干扰。
- 仅准确奖励信号能持续提升性能,随机或错误奖励无效。
- 建议未来研究在未污染数据集上评估强化学习方法,避免误导结论。
大型语言模型的推理能力备受关注,近期基于强化学习(RL)的方法在极少或无需外部监督下取得显著进展,甚至有研究声称随机或错误的奖励信号也能提升性能。然而,这些成果主要出现在对大规模网络语料预训练的 Qwen2.5 系列模型上,且集中在 MATH-500、AMC、AIME 等基准测试中,难以复现于 Llama 等其他模型。本研究通过实证分析发现,Qwen2.5 因预训练数据规模庞大,易受常见基准测试的数据污染影响。为此,我们提出 RandomCalculation,一个可生成任意长度与难度的完全干净算术问题的数据集。在该无泄露数据集上,仅准确奖励信号能带来稳定性能提升并突破基础模型上限;而随机或错误奖励则无效。进一步分析揭示了 MATH-500 与 RandomCalculation 基准表现差异的根源。因此,我们建议未来研究应在未污染基准上评估模型,并尽可能覆盖多种模型系列,以确保强化学习及相关方法结论的可信性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external supervision. Surprisingly, some studies even suggest that random or incorrect reward signals can enhance performance. However, these breakthroughs are predominantly observed for the mathematically strong Qwen2.5 series on benchmarks such as MATH-500, AMC, and AIME, and seldom transfer to models like Llama, which warrants a more in-depth investigation. In this work, our empirical analysis reveals that pre-training on massive web-scale corpora leaves Qwen2.5 susceptible to data contamination in widely used benchmarks. Consequently, conclusions derived from contaminated benchmarks on Qwen2.5 series may be unreliable. To obtain trustworthy evaluation results, we introduce a generator that creates fully clean arithmetic problems of arbitrary length and difficulty, dubbed RandomCalculation. Using this leakage-free dataset, we show that only accurate reward signals yield steady improvements that surpass the base model's performance boundary in mathematical reasoning, whereas random or incorrect rewards do not. Moreover, we conduct more fine-grained analyses to elucidate the factors underlying the different performance observed on the MATH-500 and RandomCalculation benchmarks. Consequently, we recommend that future studies evaluate models on uncontaminated benchmarks and, when feasible, test various model series to ensure trustworthy conclusions about RL and related methods.
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