提出新方法让强化学习更稳定,避免错误外推。
Reinforcement Learning via Value Gradient Flow

- 将行为正则化问题转化为最优传输路径,用价值梯度引导粒子演化。
- 在离线强化学习和大模型微调任务中均达到顶尖性能。
- 无需显式参数化策略,可动态调节训练强度,适合大规模模型。
我们研究行为正则化强化学习(RL),其中向参考分布(离线RL中的数据集或大模型微调中的基础模型)正则化对防止因分布外外推导致的价值过优化至关重要。现有方法要么依赖重参数化策略梯度,难以扩展至大型生成模型;要么采用拒绝采样,当试图超越行为支持范围时可能过于保守。本文提出价值梯度流(VGF),一种可扩展的行为正则化RL新范式。VGF将行为正则化RL建模为最优传输问题,将参考分布映射到由价值诱导的最优策略分布。通过离散梯度流求解该传输问题,价值梯度指导从参考分布初始化的粒子演化。分析表明,VGF通过控制传输预算隐式施加正则化。该方法无需显式策略参数化,同时保持表达力与灵活性,支持测试时动态调整传输预算以实现自适应缩放。大量实验表明,VGF显著优于现有方法,在离线RL基准(D4RL、OGBench)和大模型强化学习任务中均取得当前最优结果。代码与运行记录见https://ryanxhr.github.io/vgf。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We study behavior-regularized reinforcement learning (RL), where regularization toward a reference distribution (the dataset in offline RL or the base model in LLM RL finetuning) is essential to prevent value over-optimization caused by erroneous out-of-distribution extrapolation. Existing methods either rely on reparameterized policy gradient, which are difficult to scale to large generative models, or on reject sampling, which can be overly conservative when attempting to move beyond the behavior support. In this paper, we propose Value Gradient Flow (VGF), a scalable new paradigm for behavior-regularized RL. VGF casts behavior-regularized RL as an optimal transport problem that maps the reference distribution to the value-induced optimal policy distribution. We solve this transport problem via discrete gradient flow, where value gradients guide particles initialized from the reference distribution. Our analysis shows that VGF imposes regularization implicitly by controlling the transport budget. VGF eliminates explicit policy parameterization while remaining expressive and flexible, this enables adaptive test-time scaling by adjusting the transport budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VGF significantly outperforms prior methods, achieving state-of-the-art results on offline RL benchmarks (D4RL, OGBench) and LLM RL tasks. Code and runs can be found at https://ryanxhr.github.io/vgf.
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