解决大模型强化学习中熵崩溃问题,提升推理多样性与性能
Revisiting Entropy in Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models
- 发现正向优势令牌是熵崩溃主因,提出按优势重加权调节熵
- 实验揭示剪裁阈值、离策略更新次数和数据多样性影响熵变化
- 方法简单有效,适合追求推理质量的LLM训练场景
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)已成为提升大语言模型(LLMs)推理能力的重要范式。然而,LLM在RLVR训练过程中通常出现熵坍缩,导致过早收敛至次优局部极小值,阻碍性能进一步提升。尽管已有多种方法尝试缓解熵坍缩,但对RLVR中熵动态的系统研究仍显不足。为此,我们开展了广泛的实验,探究了使用RLVR训练的LLM的熵演化规律,并分析了模型熵与响应多样性、校准性及多个基准测试表现之间的关联。结果表明,三个关键因素影响熵:优化目标中的剪裁阈值、离策略更新次数以及训练数据的多样性。通过理论分析与实证验证,我们证明具有正向优势的令牌是熵坍缩的主要驱动因素。受此启发,我们提出正向优势重加权(Positive-Advantage Reweighting),一种简单而有效的策略,在RLVR训练中通过调整正向优势令牌的损失权重来调控模型熵,同时保持竞争力的表现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the entropy of LLMs usually collapses during RLVR training, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal local minima and hindering further performance improvement. Although various approaches have been proposed to mitigate entropy collapse, a comprehensive study of entropy in RLVR remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate the entropy dynamics of LLMs trained with RLVR and analyze how model entropy correlates with response diversity, calibration, and performance across various benchmarks. Our results identify three key factors that influence entropy: the clipping thresholds in the optimization objective, the number of off-policy updates, and the diversity of the training data. Furthermore, through both theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate that tokens with positive advantages are the primary drivers of entropy collapse. Motivated by this insight, we propose Positive-Advantage Reweighting, a simple yet effective approach that regulates model entropy by adjusting the loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training, while maintaining competitive performance.
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