arXiv:2601.21699cs.CLcs.IR2026-01被引 1

小模型在资源受限下也能高效多步推理,靠专家数据和证据引导探索。

Can David Beat Goliath? On Multi-Hop Reasoning with Resource-Constrained Agents

  • 引入外部专家轨迹与内部部分成功反馈,提升小批量强化学习效果。
  • 在六项多跳问答任务上超越基线,检索深度和证据覆盖率显著提升。
  • 适合研究小模型推理、低资源强化学习或复杂问题拆解的开发者参考。

多轮推理代理通过分解问题为中间检索或工具调用步骤,逐步积累支持性证据。然而,基于强化学习(RL)的训练依赖大量在线采样和大批次数据,在现实资源约束下,每个训练批次仅包含少量有效推理路径。现有方法未能充分解决此瓶颈:基于监督微调的初始化在标注轨迹稀缺时易过拟合,检索级奖励无法直接优化完整证据集的覆盖,而扩展策略可能浪费来自不佳前缀的采样。本文提出David-GRPO,通过融合当前策略内外的信息改进小批次学习:(i) 专家引导注入少量离策略专家轨迹至强化学习更新;(ii) 证据引导探索将在线部分成功转化为证据覆盖率得分,并生成额外延续路径。在四张RTX 3090 GPU上训练的1.5B参数代理中,David-GRPO在相同低预算设置下,于六个多跳问答基准上优于先前的强化学习基线。性能提升伴随行为转变:相比以往低预算基线常跳过检索或浅层搜索,David-GRPO学会增加检索深度与证据覆盖范围。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Multi-turn reasoning agents solve complex questions by decomposing them into intermediate retrieval or tool-use steps, for accumulating supporting evidence across turns. Meanwhile, with reinforcement learning (RL), training these agents rely on many on-policy rollouts and large training batches. Under realistic resource constraints that make dense exploration infeasible, each RL batch contains only few useful reasoning paths from the current policy. Existing approaches do not fully address this bottleneck: SFT-based initialization can overfit when annotated trajectories are scarce, retrieval-level rewards can assign credit to individual retrieved documents without directly optimizing coverage of the full evidence set, and expansion can waste rollouts from poorly chosen prefixes. We introduce David-GRPO, which improves small-batch learning by using information from both outside and inside the current policy: (i) expert bootstrapping injects a few off-policy expert trajectories into RL updates, and (ii) evidence-guided exploration turns on-policy partial successes into evidence-coverage scores and additional continuations. On agents up to 1.5B parameters trained on four RTX 3090 GPUs, David-GRPO improves over prior RL baselines under the same low-budget setting on six multi-hop QA benchmarks. The gains come with a behavioral shift: unlike prior low-budget RL baselines that often skip retrieval or stop after shallow search, David-GRPO learns to increase retrieval depth and evidence coverage.

多跳推理强化学习小模型资源约束

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