让大模型在问答时避免陷入错误推理,通过修正策略提升探索效率。
REX-RAG: Reasoning Exploration with Policy Correction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 用探针采样和探索性提示结合,主动避开无效推理路径。
- 在7个问答数据集上,相比基线平均提升5.1%(3B模型)和3.6%(7B模型)。
- 适合需要高可靠推理的复杂问答场景,如科研或医疗辅助。
强化学习正成为赋能大语言模型完成复杂推理任务的重要范式。近期研究显示,将强化学习与检索增强生成(RAG)结合,可使大模型动态引入外部知识,做出更明智、稳健的决策。然而,我们发现策略驱动的轨迹采样中存在关键挑战:大模型常陷入无产出的推理路径,即“死胡同”,并固执于错误结论。这严重限制了探索能力,阻碍有效策略优化。为此,我们提出REX-RAG(检索增强生成中的推理探索与策略修正),一种新框架,在保持严谨策略学习的同时,探索替代推理路径。其核心创新包括:(1) 混合采样策略,结合新型探针采样方法与探索性提示,以逃离死胡同;(2) 策略修正机制,采用重要性采样纠正混合采样引起的分布偏移,从而缓解梯度估计偏差。我们在七个问答基准上进行评估,结果表明,REX-RAG在Qwen2.5-3B上平均性能优于强基线5.1%,在Qwen2.5-7B上提升3.6%,在多个数据集上表现优异。代码已公开于https://github.com/MiliLab/REX-RAG。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning tasks. Recent advances indicate that integrating RL with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows LLMs to dynamically incorporate external knowledge, leading to more informed and robust decision making. However, we identify a critical challenge during policy-driven trajectory sampling: LLMs are frequently trapped in unproductive reasoning paths, which we refer to as "dead ends", committing to overconfident yet incorrect conclusions. This severely hampers exploration and undermines effective policy optimization. To address this challenge, we propose REX-RAG (Reasoning Exploration with Policy Correction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a novel framework that explores alternative reasoning paths while maintaining rigorous policy learning through principled distributional corrections. Our approach introduces two key innovations: (1) Mixed Sampling Strategy, which combines a novel probe sampling method with exploratory prompts to escape dead ends; and (2) Policy Correction Mechanism, which employs importance sampling to correct distribution shifts induced by mixed sampling, thereby mitigating gradient estimation bias. We evaluate it on seven question-answering benchmarks, and the experimental results show that REX-RAG achieves average performance gains of 5.1% on Qwen2.5-3B and 3.6% on Qwen2.5-7B over strong baselines, demonstrating competitive results across multiple datasets. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MiliLab/REX-RAG.
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