通过精确控制熵曲线,解决大模型强化学习性能饱和问题。
Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control

- 用拒绝采样调整优势分布,实现用户自定义熵调度。
- 40亿参数模型超越80亿基线,性能提升持续时间延长4倍。
- 无需正则化,适用于各类优势估计器,适合长期训练场景。
强化学习(RL)已使大语言模型(LLM)具备复杂推理能力,但多数RL算法存在性能饱和问题,阻碍了训练规模扩大后的持续提升。该问题可归因于熵的坍缩,这是探索能力的关键诊断指标。现有方法通过正则化或裁剪防止熵坍缩,但长期稳定性差,难以持续增益。本文提出Entrocraft,一种基于拒绝采样的简单方法,通过偏置优势分布实现用户定制的熵调度。该方法无需目标正则化,且对优势估计器无依赖。理论上,在最小假设下,我们建立了每步熵变化与优势分布的关系,解释了现有方法行为。实验揭示线性退火(起始高、衰减至略低目标值)效果最佳。实证表明,Entrocraft有效缓解性能饱和,显著提升泛化能力、输出多样性及长周期训练表现:40亿参数模型超越80亿基线,性能提升持续时间达基线4倍,pass@K提升50%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be characterized by the collapse of entropy, a key diagnostic for exploration in RL. Existing attempts focus on preventing entropy collapse through regularization or clipping. However, their resulting entropy curves often exhibit instability in the long term, which hinders performance gains. In this paper, we introduce Entrocraft, a simple rejection-sampling approach that realizes user-customized entropy schedule by biasing the advantage distributions. Entrocraft requires no objective regularization and is advantage-estimator-agnostic. Theoretically, we relate per-step entropy change to the advantage distribution under minimal assumptions. This explains the behavior of existing RL and entropy-preserving methods. Entrocraft also enables a systematic study of entropy schedules, which reveals that linear annealing, which starts high and decays to a slightly lower target, performs best. Empirically, Entrocraft addresses performance saturation, significantly improving generalization, output diversity, and long-term training. It enables a 4B model to outperform an 8B baseline, sustains improvement for up to 4x longer before plateauing, and raises pass@K by 50% over the baseline.
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