通过细粒度过程监督,让大模型推理更靠谱。
ProRAG: Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 用多步推理质量评分替代单一结果奖励,精准定位错误步骤
- 在5个长链推理任务上超越现有方法,复杂任务提升显著
- 适合需要严谨逻辑的科研、医疗等高可靠性场景
强化学习(RL)已成为优化复杂推理任务中检索增强生成(RAG)的有前景范式。然而,传统基于结果的RL方法常因奖励稀疏和信用分配效率低而受限,粗粒度标量奖励难以识别长轨迹中的具体错误步骤,导致‘过程幻觉’——模型通过错误逻辑或冗余检索得到正确答案。尽管近期过程感知方法尝试通过静态偏好学习或启发式奖励设计缓解此问题,但往往缺乏在线探索能力,无法将步骤级信用与全局结果解耦。为此,我们提出ProRAG,一种将学习到的步骤级监督融入在线优化循环的过程监督强化学习框架。该框架包含四个阶段:(1) 监督策略预热,使模型具备结构化推理格式;(2) 构建基于MCTS的流程奖励模型(PRM),量化中间推理质量;(3) PRM引导的推理精炼,使策略对齐细粒度过程偏好;(4) 双粒度优势机制的过程监督强化学习。通过聚合步骤级流程奖励与全局结果信号,ProRAG为每一步动作提供精确反馈。在五个多跳推理基准上的大量实验表明,ProRAG相较于强基线(包括基于结果和过程感知的RL方法)取得更优整体性能,尤其在复杂长时序任务中表现突出,验证了细粒度过程监督的有效性。代码与模型已开源于https://github.com/lilinwz/ProRAG。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising paradigm for optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in complex reasoning tasks. However, traditional outcome-based RL approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient credit assignment, as coarse-grained scalar rewards fail to identify specific erroneous steps within long-horizon trajectories. This ambiguity frequently leads to "process hallucinations", where models reach correct answers through flawed logic or redundant retrieval steps. Although recent process-aware approaches attempt to mitigate this via static preference learning or heuristic reward shaping, they often lack the on-policy exploration capabilities required to decouple step-level credit from global outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose ProRAG, a process-supervised reinforcement learning framework designed to integrate learned step-level supervision into the online optimization loop. Our framework consists of four stages: (1) Supervised Policy Warmup to initialize the model with a structured reasoning format; (2) construction of an MCTS-based Process Reward Model (PRM) to quantify intermediate reasoning quality; (3) PRM-Guided Reasoning Refinement to align the policy with fine-grained process preferences; and (4) Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning with a dual-granularity advantage mechanism. By aggregating step-level process rewards with global outcome signals, ProRAG provides precise feedback for every action. Extensive experiments on five multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ProRAG achieves superior overall performance compared to strong outcome-based and process-aware RL baselines, particularly on complex long-horizon tasks, validating the effectiveness of fine-grained process supervision. The code and model are available at https://github.com/lilinwz/ProRAG.
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