用扩散模型生成连续推理路径,解决强化学习中奖励信号混淆问题。
LaDi-RL: Latent Diffusion Reasoning Prevents Entropy Collapse in Reinforcement Learning
- 用扩散模型在潜空间生成推理轨迹,实现高层语义级探索。
- 在代码和数学推理任务上,pass@1指标提升9.4%和5.7%。
- 提出分层采样机制,分离潜空间质量与文本解码质量,降低奖励噪声。
强化学习已成为提升大模型推理能力的核心范式,但现有方法多在离散标记序列上优化策略,导致优化空间与推理结构不匹配:重要决策多为语义性、全局性和轨迹级的,而非局部标记选择。连续潜空间强化学习提供了一种替代方案,允许策略探索更高层次的推理表示。然而,仅迁移至潜空间仍不足:策略需建模有效推理轨迹上的复杂多模态分布。为此,我们提出潜空间扩散推理与强化学习(LaDi-RL),通过迭代去噪生成潜空间推理轨迹。该方法支持结构化探索与高表达力分布建模,但也引入根本性的信用分配挑战——策略作用于潜空间,而奖励仅在潜空间解码为文本后才可获得。朴素的回放策略会将潜空间推理质量与文本解码质量混杂,难以判断错误答案源于不良潜轨迹还是解码缺陷。为此,我们引入分层潜-文本回放:对每个潜轨迹采样多个文本补全,并聚合其奖励,得到解码无关的潜空间效用估计。该机制提供更清晰、方差更低的奖励信号以优化扩散策略。实验表明,LaDi-RL在代码生成任务上相较标记级强化学习提升9.4%的pass@1,在数学推理任务上提升5.7%,甚至超过基础模型的pass@k表现。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning has become a central paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, but most existing methods optimize policies over discrete token sequences. This creates a mismatch between the optimization space and the structure of reasoning: many important decisions are semantic, global, and trajectory-level rather than local token choices. Continuous latent-space RL offers a promising alternative by allowing policies to explore higher-level reasoning representations. However, simply moving to latent space is not sufficient. The resulting policy must model a complex, multi-modal distribution over valid reasoning trajectories. We therefore propose Latent Diffusion Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning (LaDi-RL), where a diffusion model generates latent reasoning trajectories through iterative denoising. This formulation enables structured exploration and expressive distribution modeling, but also introduces a fundamental credit-assignment challenge: the policy acts in latent space, while rewards are observed only after the latent is decoded into text. A naive rollout strategy therefore entangles latent reasoning quality with text decoding quality, making it unclear whether an incorrect answer results from a poor latent trajectory or from an imperfect textual realization. To address this, we introduce hierarchical latent-text rollouts. We sample multiple text completions for each latent trajectory and aggregate their rewards to obtain a decoder-marginalized estimate of latent utility. This provides a cleaner and lower-variance reward signal for optimizing the diffusion policy. Empirically, LaDi-RL outperforms token-level RL by 9.4% on code generation and 5.7% on math reasoning in pass@1, and even surpasses the base model's pass@k performance.
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