针对大模型推理中难例信号丢失问题,提出自适应采样框架提升强化学习效果。
Reinforce-Ada: An Adaptive Sampling Framework under Non-linear RL Objectives
- 基于非线性强化学习目标设计加权梯度估计,自动聚焦难例
- 动态分配计算资源,使收敛速度提升至2倍且不增加总预算
- 适用于需高效利用计算资源的复杂推理任务
大型语言模型推理中的强化学习常因信号丢失而受阻,即小批量均匀采样难以发现难例的有用学习信号。我们证明该现象是欠采样的统计结果,而非模型固有局限。为此,提出基于非线性强化学习目标(如对数似然)的理论框架,其自然诱导出优先处理难例的加权梯度估计,可通过自适应采样稳健实现。基于此,提出Reinforce-Ada算法族,根据提示难度动态分配推理预算,将计算资源集中于最需要处。不同于被动丢弃低信号样本的方法,Reinforce-Ada主动投入算力以恢复信号。提出两种高效实现:基于估计的方法与无模型的序列采样方法。在多个基准测试中,Reinforce-Ada显著优于统一采样基线(如GRPO),恢复丢失信号,加速收敛最高达2倍,同时保持相同总推理预算。代码见https://github.com/RLHFlow/Reinforce-Ada。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model reasoning is frequently hindered by signal loss, a phenomenon where standard uniform sampling with small group sizes fails to uncover informative learning signals for difficult prompts. We demonstrate that this collapse is a statistical artifact of undersampling rather than an inherent model limitation. To address this systematically, we introduce a theoretical framework based on optimizing a non-linear RL objective (e.g., log-likelihood). We show that this objective naturally induces a weighted gradient estimator that prioritizes difficult prompts, which can be robustly realized through adaptive sampling. Guided by this framework, we propose Reinforce-Ada, a family of algorithms that dynamically allocates inference budgets based on prompt difficulty, effectively scaling up RL compute to where it is needed most. Unlike passive filtering methods that discard low-signal prompts, Reinforce-Ada actively invests compute to recover them. We introduce two efficient realizations: an estimation-based approach and a model-free sequential sampling approach. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that Reinforce-Ada significantly outperforms uniform baselines like GRPO, recovering lost signals and accelerating convergence by up to $2\times$ while maintaining the same total inference budget. Code is available at https://github.com/RLHFlow/Reinforce-Ada.
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