arXiv:2602.02150cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 3

ECHO提升测试时强化学习的探索效率与稳定性。

ECHO: Entropy-Confidence Hybrid Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

  • 融合局部熵与群体置信度动态控制分支宽度
  • 在有限回溯预算下显著提升数学与视觉推理性能
  • 适合资源受限场景下的在线策略优化

测试时强化学习通过多次回溯生成候选答案,并利用多数投票构建伪标签进行在线更新。为降低开销并提升探索效率,现有方法采用树状回溯结构,共享推理前缀并在关键节点分叉。然而该范式仍面临两大挑战:(1) 高熵分叉易引发回溯崩溃,即分叉预算集中于少数连续高熵段,导致有效分支数迅速减少;(2) 早期伪标签噪声大且有偏,可能引发自增强过拟合,使策略过早锐化并抑制探索。为此,我们提出熵-置信度混合组相对策略优化(ECHO)。回溯阶段,ECHO联合使用局部熵与群体置信度自适应调控分支宽度,并引入基于置信度的在线剪枝机制,终止持续低置信度分支,避免高熵陷阱并缓解崩溃。更新阶段,采用置信度自适应裁剪及熵-置信度混合优势塑造策略,增强训练鲁棒性并缓解初期偏差。实验表明,ECHO在多个数学与视觉推理基准上均取得一致性能提升,且在有限回溯预算下具备更强泛化能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test-time reinforcement learning generates multiple candidate answers via repeated rollouts and performs online updates using pseudo-labels constructed by majority voting. To reduce overhead and improve exploration, prior work introduces tree structured rollouts, which share reasoning prefixes and branch at key nodes to improve sampling efficiency. However, this paradigm still faces two challenges: (1) high entropy branching can trigger rollout collapse, where the branching budget concentrates on a few trajectories with consecutive high-entropy segments, rapidly reducing the number of effective branches; (2) early pseudo-labels are noisy and biased, which can induce self-reinforcing overfitting, causing the policy to sharpen prematurely and suppress exploration. To address these issues, we propose Entropy Confidence Hybrid Group Relative Policy Optimization (ECHO). During rollout, ECHO jointly leverages local entropy and group level confidence to adaptively control branch width, and further introduces online confidence-based pruning to terminate persistently low confidence branches, avoiding high entropy traps and mitigating collapse. During policy updates, ECHO employs confidence adaptive clipping and an entropy confidence hybrid advantage shaping approach to enhance training robustness and mitigate early stage bias. Experiments demonstrate that ECHO achieves consistent gains on multiple mathematical and visual reasoning benchmarks, and generalizes more effectively under a limited rollout budget.

强化学习测试时学习策略优化

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