arXiv:2605.07331cs.LGcs.AI2026-05被引 2

提出累积词元重要性采样,解决大模型强化学习中的偏差与方差难题。

Rethinking Importance Sampling in LLM Policy Optimization: A Cumulative Token Perspective

  • 用累积词元比替代传统采样,理论证明无偏且方差更低。
  • 在数学推理任务上,不同规模模型均优于GRPO和GSPO基线。
  • 适合需要稳定训练的大模型策略优化场景。

强化学习,包括可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR),已成为大语言模型后训练的强大方法。其核心在于离策略策略梯度估计中重要性采样(IS)比率的设计。现有方法面临根本的偏差-方差困境:词元级IS比率(如PPO、GRPO)因忽略前缀状态分布不匹配而引入偏差;完整序列比率虽能精确轨迹修正,但因逐词元比率相乘导致高方差;而GSPO通过长度归一化提升数值稳定性,却偏离了精确的全序列IS修正。本文识别出累积词元IS比率(即截至位置$t$的词元比率乘积)为该困境的理论解。我们证明,在词元级策略梯度框架下,该比率对每个词元梯度项提供无偏前缀修正,且方差严格低于完整序列比率。基于此,我们提出CTPO(累积词元策略优化),结合累积词元IS比率与位置自适应截断——按自然$\ oot2\ $增长规律调整对数空间截断边界,实现各词元位置更一致的正则化。我们在多个挑战性的数学推理基准上,于工具集成推理设置中实现了对强基线GRPO和GSPO的最佳平均性能表现。代码将开源至https://github.com/horizon-llm/CTPO。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning, including reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), has emerged as a powerful approach for LLM post-training. Central to these approaches is the design of the importance sampling (IS) ratio used in off-policy policy-gradient estimation. Existing methods face a fundamental bias-variance dilemma: token-level IS ratios, as adopted by PPO (Schulman et al., 2017) and GRPO (Shao et al., 2024), introduce bias by ignoring prefix state distribution mismatch; full sequence ratios provide exact trajectory-level correction but suffer from high variance due to the multiplicative accumulation of per-token ratios, while GSPO (Zheng et al., 2025) improves numerical stability via length normalization at the cost of deviating from the exact full-sequence IS correction. In this work, we identify the cumulative token IS ratio, the product of per-token ratios up to position $t$, as a theoretically principled solution to this dilemma. We prove that, under the token-level policy-gradient formulation, this ratio provides an unbiased prefix correction for each token-level gradient term and has strictly lower variance than the full sequence ratio. Building on this insight, we propose CTPO (Cumulative Token Policy Optimization), which combines the cumulative token IS ratio with position-adaptive clipping that scales log-space clip bounds according to the natural $\sqrt{t}$ growth of the cumulative log-ratio. This yields more consistent regularization across token positions. We implement and evaluate CTPO in the tool-integrated reasoning setting on several challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, achieving the best average performance across both model scales compared with strong GRPO and GSPO baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/horizon-llm/CTPO.

强化学习大模型训练重要性采样策略优化

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