让大模型推理更准又不失多样性,解决奖励只看答案对错的副作用。
Outcome-based Exploration for LLM Reasoning
- 用最终答案的罕见度给探索加分,激励模型尝试不同解法。
- 在数学竞赛题上提升准确率,同时避免生成答案越来越单一。
- 适合追求高可靠、可扩展推理能力的研究者和工程师。
强化学习(RL)已成为提升大语言模型(LLM)推理能力的有效方法。基于结果的强化学习仅根据最终答案正确性奖励策略,虽显著提升准确率,但导致生成多样性系统性下降,削弱实际部署中的表现。我们通过将后训练强化学习视为采样过程,发现强化学习甚至会降低训练集上的有效多样性。研究揭示两大关键现象:(i) 多样性退化具有传递性,已解决的问题多样性下降会波及未解问题;(ii) 结果空间可处理性强,推理任务的可能答案种类有限。受此启发,我们提出基于结果的探索机制,按最终结果分配探索奖励。设计两种互补算法:历史探索通过类似UCB的奖励鼓励罕见答案,批量探索则惩罚批次内重复以提升测试时多样性。在Llama与Qwen模型上的标准竞赛数学题实验表明,两者均在保持或提升准确率的同时缓解多样性崩溃。理论层面,我们通过新的基于结果的老虎机模型形式化了探索收益。这些贡献为实现高效推理且不牺牲多样性的强化学习方法提供了可行路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial accuracy gains but also induces a systematic loss in generation diversity. This collapse undermines real-world performance, where diversity is critical for test-time scaling. We analyze this phenomenon by viewing RL post-training as a sampling process and show that, strikingly, RL can reduce effective diversity even on the training set relative to the base model. Our study highlights two central findings: (i) a transfer of diversity degradation, where reduced diversity on solved problems propagates to unsolved ones, and (ii) the tractability of the outcome space, since reasoning tasks admit only a limited set of distinct answers. Motivated by these insights, we propose outcome-based exploration, which assigns exploration bonuses according to final outcomes. We introduce two complementary algorithms: historical exploration, which encourages rarely observed answers via UCB-style bonuses, and batch exploration, which penalizes within-batch repetition to promote test-time diversity. Experiments on standard competition math with Llama and Qwen models demonstrate that both methods improve accuracy while mitigating diversity collapse. On the theoretical side, we formalize the benefit of outcome-based exploration through a new model of outcome-based bandits. Together, these contributions chart a practical path toward RL methods that enhance reasoning without sacrificing the diversity essential for scalable deployment.
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