arXiv:2508.10123cs.LGcs.AI2025-08

用分层行为模型提升大模型微调效率,降低计算成本。

Nested-ReFT: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning via Off-Policy Rollouts

  • 用部分层作为行为模型生成离策略完成文本,减少推理开销。
  • 在多个数学推理数据集上实现每秒生成更多令牌,效率提升显著。
  • 提出三种偏差缓解策略,保持性能接近标准ReFT,适合资源受限场景。

大语言模型在数学推理等复杂领域中的高级推理能力可通过基于可验证奖励的强化微调(ReFT)来提升。标准ReFT框架中,行为模型为每个问题生成多个包含答案的完整输出,再由奖励函数评分。尽管此类强化学习后训练方法在挑战性推理任务中表现优异,但训练期间多次推理生成输出导致计算成本较高。为此,我们借鉴离策略强化学习与推测解码思想,提出新型ReFT框架Nested-ReFT:目标模型的部分层作为行为模型,在训练中生成离策略完成文本。通过每批次动态跳过层,相比标准ReFT显著降低推理成本。理论分析表明,Nested-ReFT能提供无偏梯度估计且方差可控。实证结果表明,在多个数学推理基准和不同规模模型上,其计算效率(令牌/秒)显著提升。此外,我们探索了三种偏差缓解方法,有效降低梯度更新中的离策略偏差,使性能与基线ReFT相当。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with answers per problem, for the answer to be then scored by a reward function. While such RL post-training methods demonstrate significant performance improvements across challenging reasoning domains, the computational cost of generating completions during training with multiple inference steps makes the training cost non-trivial. To address this, we draw inspiration from off-policy RL, and speculative decoding to introduce a novel ReFT framework, dubbed Nested-ReFT, where a subset of layers of the target model acts as the behavior model to generate off-policy completions during training. The behavior model configured with dynamic layer skipping per batch during training decreases the inference cost compared to the standard ReFT frameworks. Our theoretical analysis shows that Nested-ReFT yields unbiased gradient estimates with controlled variance. Our empirical analysis demonstrates improved computational efficiency measured as tokens/sec across multiple math reasoning benchmarks and model sizes. Additionally, we explore three variants of bias mitigation to minimize the off-policyness in the gradient updates that allows for maintaining performance that matches the baseline ReFT performance.

强化学习大模型微调效率优化数学推理

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。