arXiv:2601.18779cs.LGcs.AI2026-01被引 30

用专家解题引导探索,让大模型学会解决难题

POPE: Learning to Reason on Hard Problems via Privileged On-Policy Exploration

  • 给难问题加专家解题前缀,让强化学习获得正反馈
  • 在数学推理基准上性能显著提升,可解问题数量大幅增加
  • 适合研究大模型推理能力提升与强化学习融合的学者

强化学习虽提升了大语言模型的推理能力,但现有方法在难题上仍难以有效探索。由于策略在硬任务中极少产生正确路径,导致奖励为零,无法提供学习信号。经典方法如熵奖励、重要性比例宽松裁剪或直接优化 pass@k 目标均无法解决此问题,且常引发训练不稳定。尝试通过简单问题迁移亦不可行,因存在「射线干扰」现象:优化过程被已可解的问题主导,反而抑制对难题的进展。为此,本文提出特权在线探索(POPE),将人类或其他专家解决方案作为特权信息,以引导难问题的探索过程,而非作为训练目标。通过在难问题前添加专家解题前缀,使强化学习在引导式推演中获得非零奖励。关键在于,由此产生的行为能通过指令跟随与推理能力的协同作用,反向迁移到原始无引导问题上。实验证明,POPE 显著扩展了可解问题范围,在多个复杂推理基准上实现大幅提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single correct rollout, yielding zero reward and no learning signal for driving improvement. We find that natural solutions to remedy this exploration problem from classical RL, such as entropy bonuses, more permissive clipping of the importance ratio, or direct optimization of pass@k objectives, do not resolve this issue and often destabilize optimization without improving solvability. A natural alternative is to leverage transfer from easier problems. However, we show that mixing easy and hard problems during RL training is counterproductive due to ray interference, where optimization focuses on already-solvable problems in a way that actively inhibits progress on harder ones. To address this challenge, we introduce Privileged On-Policy Exploration (POPE), an approach that leverages human- or other oracle solutions as privileged information to guide exploration on hard problems, unlike methods that use oracle solutions as training targets (e.g., off-policy RL methods or warmstarting from SFT). POPE augments hard problems with prefixes of oracle solutions, enabling RL to obtain non-zero rewards during guided rollouts. Crucially, the resulting behaviors transfer back to the original, unguided problems through a synergy between instruction-following and reasoning. Empirically, POPE expands the set of solvable problems and substantially improves performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks.

强化学习大模型推理探索引导

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