用历史模型生成多样推理起点,提升大模型强化训练效果
Thinking Seeds: Leveraging Historical Diversity for Position-Aware RL in LLMs
- 以模型历史版本作为推理前缀,实现分位置的混合策略
- 在数学推理任务上超越标准强化训练,性能显著提升
- 适合需要持续探索能力的大模型强化学习场景
语言模型后训练中的在线强化学习面临根本矛盾:随着训练推进,策略熵下降,采样多样性减少,导致模型‘遗忘’早期探索能力。尽管离线数据可恢复多样性,现有方法在序列层面混合完整轨迹,引发严重策略错配和训练不稳定。我们提出 extbf{Thinking Seeds},一种基于标记级别的混合策略框架,将模型自身的历史检查点作为离线前缀,提供多样化的推理起点,而关键延续部分仍由在线策略生成,以保证梯度质量。通过标记级重要性比率,Thinking Seeds有效利用历史多样性,同时维持训练稳定性。在多个模型和数学推理基准上的实验证明,该方法持续优于标准在线训练及现有离线扩展方法。分析显示,该方法保持更高有效熵,降低截断带来的梯度损失,并扩大可探索解空间,阐明了位置感知混合策略如何同时提升探索与最终性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) for language model post-training suffers from a fundamental tension: as training progresses, policy entropy collapses and sampling diversity diminishes, causing the model to ``forget'' its own earlier exploratory capacity. While off-policy data can restore diversity, existing methods mix entire trajectories at the sequence level, introducing severe policy mismatch and training instability. We argue that the core question is not \emph{whether} to use off-policy data, but \emph{where} in the sequence it should appear. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{Thinking Seeds}, a token-level mix-policy framework that uses the model's own historical checkpoints as off-policy prefixes, providing diverse starting points for reasoning, while the critical continuation is generated on-policy to preserve gradient quality. Through token-level importance ratios, Thinking Seeds effectively leverages historical diversity without compromising training stability. Extensive experiments across models and mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Thinking Seeds consistently outperforms standard on-policy training and existing off-policy extensions. Our analysis reveals that the method maintains higher effective entropy, reduces gradient loss from clipping, and expands the explorable solution space, clarifying how position-aware mix-policy modeling improves both exploration and final performance in LLM RL.
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