arXiv:2510.15502cs.LGcs.AI2025-10

通过逐次生成解草图,提升大模型强化学习中的探索多样性。

The Road Less Traveled: Enhancing Exploration in LLMs via Sequential Sampling

  • 逐次生成解草图,前一个输出影响下一个,增强多样性。
  • 在三个代理基准上成功率提升0.07至0.42,最高相对提升211%。
  • 适合需要多样化推理路径的复杂任务场景,如智能体规划。

强化学习(RL)在提升大语言模型(LLM)推理能力方面至关重要,但常面临探索受限和熵坍塌问题,导致模型局限于少数解法,丧失采样多样性,阻碍性能进一步提升。这一问题在并行采样中尤为严重,因多个输出来自同一分布,易导致模型收敛于相似解。本文提出SESA——一种新型的顺序采样框架,通过先逐次生成多样化的解草图,再扩展为完整推理路径,确保每一步输出均依赖先前结果,从而持续促进多样性,防止策略坍塌。实验表明,在合成任务中,顺序采样显著优于传统RL方法,具备更强的路径多样性和崩溃恢复能力。在真实任务评估中,SESA有效提升了合法策略的探索范围与整体性能:在三个代理基准上,成功率分别提升0.25、0.42和0.07(相对于基线模型),最高实现211%的相对改进,验证了其探索优势。本工作为强化学习训练的LLM提供了结构化探索新范式。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been pivotal in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from limited exploration and entropy collapse, where models exploit a narrow set of solutions, leading to a loss of sampling diversity and subsequently preventing RL from further improving performance. This issue is exacerbated in parallel sampling methods, where multiple outputs are drawn from the same distribution, potentially causing the model to converge to similar solutions. We propose SESA, a novel SEquential SAmpling framework that mitigates this challenge by generating diverse solution sketches sequentially before expanding them into full reasoning paths. This approach ensures broader exploration by conditioning each new output on previous ones, promoting diversity throughout the process and preventing policy collapse. Our experiments on a synthetic task show that sequential sampling consistently outperforms traditional RL methods in terms of path diversity and recovery from collapse. Further evaluations on real-world tasks demonstrate that SESA improves both the exploration of valid strategies and the overall performance of LLMs. On three agent benchmarks, SESA lifts success rates by $+0.25$, $+0.42$, and $+0.07$ absolute over the base model (up to an additional $211\%$ relative improvement over baseline RL), underscoring its exploration advantage. This work introduces a structured approach to exploration, paving the way for more effective and diverse reasoning in RL-trained LLMs. Our code is released at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/sesa.

强化学习大模型推理探索多样性

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