让语言模型学会用推理信息训练,推理时却无需依赖它。
Privileged Information Distillation for Language Models
- 用联合训练让教师模型带推理信息,学生模型不依赖它。
- 在多个任务上优于传统监督微调+强化学习的方法。
- 适合想在推理时省去复杂推理过程的AI系统设计者。
训练时使用特权信息(PI)可使语言模型在原本无法完成的任务中取得成功,尤其适用于高难度、长周期的强化学习场景。然而,如何将训练中获得的能力迁移到推理时无法访问PI的策略中,仍是核心挑战。本文聚焦于多轮代理环境中的前沿模型蒸馏问题,这类环境通常只暴露动作轨迹,隐藏内部推理过程,破坏了标准蒸馏流程。为此,我们提出π-Distill:一种联合训练机制,同时训练一个依赖PI的教师模型和一个无条件的学生模型,二者共享同一架构。此外,还提出一种替代方案——基于策略自蒸馏(OPSD),通过强化学习并引入反向KL惩罚项,使学生与带PI的教师对齐。实验表明,π-Distill及部分情况下OPSD,在仅使用动作轨迹作为输入的前提下,显著优于行业标准方法(监督微调+强化学习),后者需完整思维链监督。我们进一步分析了有效利用PI的关键因素,重点验证π-Distill的适用条件,并界定OPSD的竞争力边界。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Training-time privileged information (PI) can enable language models to succeed on tasks they would otherwise fail, making it a powerful tool for reinforcement learning in hard, long-horizon settings. However, transferring capabilities learned with PI to policies that must act without it at inference time remains a fundamental challenge. We study this problem in the context of distilling frontier models for multi-turn agentic environments, which typically hide their internal reasoning and expose only action trajectories. This breaks standard distillation pipelines, since successful behavior is observable, but the reasoning process is not. For this, we introduce π-Distill, a joint teacher-student objective that trains a PI-conditioned teacher and an unconditioned student simultaneously using the same model. Additionally, we also introduce On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), an alternative approach that trains using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a reverse KL-penalty between the student and the PI-conditioned teacher. We show that both of these algorithms effectively distill frontier agents using action-only PI. Specifically, we find that π-Distill and, in some cases, OPSD, outperform industry standard practices (Supervised finetuning followed by RL) that assume access to full Chain-of-Thought supervision across multiple agentic benchmarks, models, and forms of PI. We complement our results with extensive analysis that characterizes the factors enabling effective learning with PI, focusing primarily on π-Distill and characterizing when OPSD is competitive.
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