arXiv:2604.00860cs.LG2026-04被引 2

提出PIPO框架,让强化学习更新时能验证是否真进步了。

Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning

  • 用历史表现作锚点,判断每次策略更新是否真的更好。
  • 在数学推理、代码生成等任务上,比传统方法提升10%以上。
  • 适合想提升强化学习训练稳定性和效果的研究者。

强化学习已成为提升大模型与智能体能力的核心后训练范式。然而现有方法普遍存在盲点:仅依赖采样轨迹、奖励或反馈条件目标构建局部学习信号,却未显式验证新策略是否优于旧策略。优化这些局部信号未必带来实际性能提升,而有限采样、生成随机性及反馈噪声会进一步扩大差距。本文认为缺失的关键是策略改进反馈——即跨迭代性能提升的度量。为此提出策略改进强化学习(PIRL),将迭代间性能增益作为与最终任务性能结构对齐的显式目标。基于PIRL,设计了策略改进策略优化(PIPO),一个可插拔的闭环框架,通过滑动窗口的历史表现锚点验证前次更新效果。PIPO利用此改进反馈调节基础策略优化算法的局部信号,增强有进展的更新,抑制性能下降的更新。理论证明,PIPO在局部上与PIRL目标对齐。在数学推理、代码生成、工具使用及自蒸馏设置下的实验表明,PIPO在PPO、组相对和自蒸馏策略优化族中均实现一致增益。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning has become a central post-training paradigm for improving LLM and agent capabilities. Yet existing RL post-training methods share a common blind spot: they construct local learning signals from sampled trajectories, rewards, or feedback-conditioned targets, then update the policy without explicitly verifying whether the resulting policy outperforms its predecessor. Optimizing these local signals does not necessarily produce a better policy, while finite sampling, generation stochasticity and feedback noise can further widen this gap. We argue that the missing ingredient is policy improvement feedback: the ability to measure progress across policy iterations. We introduce Policy Improvement Reinforcement Learning (PIRL), which formulates inter-iteration performance gain as an explicit objective structurally aligned with final task performance. Building on PIRL, we propose Policy Improvement Policy Optimization (PIPO), a plug-in closed-loop framework that verifies the previous update against a sliding-window historical performance anchor. PIPO uses this improvement feedback to modulate the local learning signal of the base policy optimization algorithm, reinforcing updates associated with measured progress and suppressing those associated with performance drops. We provide theoretical evidence that PIPO locally aligns policy updates with the PIRL improvement objective. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, tool-use, and self-distillation settings show that PIPO yields consistent gains across PPO, group-relative, and self-distillation policy optimization families.

强化学习策略优化大模型训练

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。