arXiv:2602.04879cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 25

改进大模型强化学习的更新机制,提升训练稳定性和效率。

Rethinking the Trust Region in LLM Reinforcement Learning

  • 用直接估计策略差异替代传统概率比率裁剪。
  • 在多个基准上实现更稳定的训练和更快的收敛速度。
  • 适合追求高效可靠大模型微调的研究者与开发者。

强化学习(RL)已成为微调大语言模型(LLM)的核心方法,其中近端策略优化(PPO)是主流算法。然而,我们指出PPO中的概率比率裁剪机制在处理大词汇量的LLM时存在结构性缺陷:该机制基于采样词元的概率比,作为真实策略差异的噪声单样本蒙特卡洛估计,导致对低概率词元的更新被过度惩罚,而高概率词元的潜在灾难性变化却约束不足,造成训练效率低下和不稳定性。为此,我们提出分歧近端策略优化(DPPO),以总变差或KL散度等更合理的策略差异估计替代启发式裁剪。为避免巨大内存开销,引入高效的二值化和Top-K近似方法,在几乎无额外开销下捕捉关键差异。大量实证评估表明,与现有方法相比,DPPO在训练稳定性和效率上均有显著提升,为基于RL的大模型微调提供了更稳健的基础。代码已开源:https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

大模型微调强化学习策略优化训练稳定

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