提出FPA方法,解决离线强化学习中错误路径干扰正确路径的问题。
Future Policy Approximation for Offline Reinforcement Learning in LLM Reasoning
- 用未来策略估计重加权梯度,避免错误轨迹抑制正确路径。
- 在7个数学推理和3个代码生成任务上优于DPO、RPO等基线方法。
- 适合追求高效、稳定长序列推理训练的研究者与工程师。
强化学习(RL)已成为大语言模型(LLM)复杂推理后训练的关键驱动力,但在线RL带来显著不稳定性与计算开销。离线RL通过解耦生成与训练提供替代方案,然而其在推理场景下的优化仍落后于在线方法。本文重新审视基于策略梯度的离线RL潜力,针对离线学习的核心挑战——梯度纠缠:在长时序推理轨迹中,正确与错误解存在大量共享标记,导致错误轨迹的梯度更新会抑制对正确解同样关键的标记。为此,提出未来策略近似(Future Policy Approximation, FPA),一种简单的离线策略梯度方法,使用未来策略而非当前策略对梯度进行加权,实现主动梯度重加权。未来策略通过logit空间外推估计。在三种模型、七个数学推理基准及三个代码生成基准上,FPA持续优于强基线(包括DPO、RPO、KTO和原始离线RL)。FPA稳定了长时序训练过程(原始目标在此失效),且以远低于状态最优的RLVR方法(如GRPO、DAPO)的GPU小时数达到相当的准确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key driver of post-training for complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet online RL introduces substantial instability and computational overhead. Offline RL offers a compelling alternative by decoupling generation from training; however, offline algorithms for reasoning remain under-optimized relative to their online counterparts. We revisit the potential of policy-gradient-style offline RL and address a central challenge in offline learning: gradient entanglement. In long-horizon reasoning trajectories, correct and incorrect solutions share substantial token overlap, causing gradient updates from incorrect trajectories to suppress tokens that are also critical for correct ones. We propose Future Policy Approximation (FPA), a simple offline policy-gradient method that weights gradients using an estimate of the future policy rather than the current policy, enabling proactive gradient reweighting. We estimate the future policy through logit- space extrapolation. Across three models, seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks, and three code-generation benchmarks, FPA consistently improves over strong offline baselines, including DPO, RPO, KTO, and vanilla offline RL. FPA stabilizes long-horizon training, where vanilla objectives degrade, and achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art RLVR methods such as GRPO and DAPO at a fraction of the GPU hours.
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