arXiv:2602.12642cs.CLcs.AI2026-02

用奖励函数当难度调度器,让大模型更高效地学推理

Beyond Normalization: Rethinking the Partition Function as a Difficulty Scheduler for RLVR

  • 把归一化常数重解释为每题准确率信号,指导训练优先级
  • 在多个基准上比GRPO等方法提升样本效率,效果显著
  • 复用已有训练数据,零额外开销实现更优学习

以奖励最大化为目标的强化学习方法虽能提升大模型的推理能力,但常导致生成多样性下降。近期工作通过引入GFlowNets,在训练大模型匹配目标分布的同时联合学习其分区函数。不同于以往将分区函数仅视为归一化因子的做法,本文将其重新理解为每题的期望奖励(即在线准确率)信号,利用这一未被充分利用的信息提升采样效率。具体而言,我们首先建立了分区函数与每题准确率估计之间的理论关联;基于此,提出分区函数引导的强化学习框架PACED-RL,通过准确率估计优先选择信息量大的问题提示进行训练,并采用误差优先的回放机制进一步提升样本效率。两个组件均复用GFlowNet训练过程中已产生的信息,有效将计算开销摊入现有优化流程中。在多个不同基准上的大量实验表明,PACED-RL显著优于GRPO及先前的GFlowNet方法,证明其是实现更高效分布匹配训练的有前景方向。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reward-maximizing RL methods have shown to be capable of enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs, but often lead to reduced generation diversity. Recent works address this issue by adopting GFlowNets, training LLMs to match a target distribution while jointly learning its partition function. In contrast to prior works that treat this partition function solely as a normalizer, we reinterpret it as a per-prompt expected-reward (i.e., online accuracy) signal, leveraging this unused information to improve sample efficiency. Specifically, we first establish a theoretical relationship between the partition function and per-prompt accuracy estimates. Building on this key insight, we propose Partition Function-Guided RL (PACED-RL), a post-training framework that leverages accuracy estimates to prioritize informative question prompts during training, and further improves sample efficiency through an accuracy estimate error-prioritized replay. Crucially, both components reuse information already produced during GFlowNet training, effectively amortizing the compute overhead into the existing optimization process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate strong performance improvements over GRPO and prior GFlowNet approaches, highlighting PACED-RL as a promising direction for a more sample efficient distribution-matching training for LLMs.

强化学习大模型推理样本效率分布匹配

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