提出新目标函数稳定大偏离策略优化,提升推理模型训练效果
A Step Back: Prefix Importance Ratio Stabilizes Policy Optimization
- 用前缀重要性比替代传统令牌级权重,更准确修正策略偏差
- 在多数学推理任务上,训练稳定性与最终性能显著提升
- 适合大规模语言模型的离策略强化学习训练场景
强化学习后训练在大型语言模型中展现出强大的推理能力。为提高训练效率,通常采用旧采样策略生成轨迹并用于更新当前目标策略,即离策略方式。为纠正采样策略与目标策略间的差异,现有大多数强化学习目标依赖于计算简单且数值稳定的令牌级重要性采样比。然而我们发现,当离策略程度较大时,令牌级校正常导致训练动态不稳定。本文重新审视大模型在离策略条件下的策略优化问题,表明理论上严格的校正项应为前缀重要性比,而将其简化为令牌级近似会引发不稳定性。为此,我们提出一种简单但有效的目标函数——最小前缀比率(MinPRO),用非累积的最小令牌级比率作为前缀比率的替代,以稳定大离策略漂移下的优化过程。在密集型与专家混合型大模型上,多个数学推理基准测试的广泛实验表明,MinPRO在离策略设置下显著提升了训练稳定性和峰值性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has increasingly demonstrated strong ability to elicit reasoning behaviors in large language models (LLMs). For training efficiency, rollouts are typically generated in an off-policy manner using an older sampling policy and then used to update the current target policy. To correct the resulting discrepancy between the sampling and target policies, most existing RL objectives rely on a token-level importance sampling ratio, primarily due to its computational simplicity and numerical stability. However, we observe that token-level correction often leads to unstable training dynamics when the degree of off-policyness is large. In this paper, we revisit LLM policy optimization under off-policy conditions and show that the theoretically rigorous correction term is the prefix importance ratio, and that relaxing it to a token-level approximation can induce instability in RL post-training. To stabilize LLM optimization under large off-policy drift, we propose a simple yet effective objective, Minimum Prefix Ratio (MinPRO). MinPRO replaces the unstable cumulative prefix ratio with a non-cumulative surrogate based on the minimum token-level ratio observed in the preceding prefix. Extensive experiments on both dense and mixture-of-experts LLMs, across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrate that MinPRO substantially improves training stability and peak performance in off-policy regimes.
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