用注意力熵发现强化学习中不同令牌的学习差异,提升模型推理能力。
Not All Tokens Learn Alike: Attention Entropy Reveals Heterogeneous Signals in RL Reasoning

- 通过注意力熵识别出稳定锚点与探索型令牌两类学习信号。
- 仅训练低熵令牌可保持性能,高熵令牌虽波动大但蕴含难推理线索。
- 动态熵感知重加权使模型平均得分提升3.01点,适合优化推理任务者参考。
基于强化学习的后训练已成为提升大语言模型推理能力的关键方法,但其逐令牌学习信号的理解仍不充分。本文通过注意力熵分析揭示了令牌间学习信号的异质性:注意力熵低的令牌(称作锚点)依赖集中上下文支持,产生稳定梯度,构成可靠优化基础,但在复杂任务上易停滞;注意力熵高的令牌(称作探索者)聚合更分散的上下文,引发更大但更波动的梯度。仅训练探索者整体不稳定,但少数成功案例表明其在优化稳定时可能包含重要难推理信号。通过证据收集、熵动态、梯度几何诊断及控制实验,确认位置、预测熵和损失归一化无法解释该差异。最后,一种动态熵感知软重加权策略将Qwen3-8B-Base在最优设置下的外部平均得分从34.39提升至37.40。结果表明,注意力熵能揭示令牌级强化学习信号中的优化相关结构,而均匀令牌平均可能掩盖推理后训练中的关键异质性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement-learning-based post-training has become a key approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but its token-level learning signals remain poorly understood. This work studies their heterogeneity through attention entropy, which measures how concentrated or diffuse the contextual support is for each response token. We first show that token-level RL objectives are sparsely estimable: uniformly random 20 percent token subsets preserve much of the full-token held-out performance, suggesting substantial redundancy in token-level updates. However, entropy-structured subsets behave very differently. Low-attention-entropy tokens, which we call anchors, rely on concentrated support, produce stable gradients aligned with full-token updates, and provide a reliable optimization backbone, but tend to plateau on harder benchmarks. High-attention-entropy tokens, which we call explorers, aggregate more diffuse context and induce larger but more volatile gradients. Explorer-only training is unstable on average, though rare successful runs suggest that these tokens may contain useful hard-reasoning signals when optimization remains stable. We support this anchor-explorer spectrum with evidence-gathering analyses, entropy dynamics, gradient-geometry diagnostics, and controls showing that position, predictive entropy, and loss normalization do not explain the observed asymmetry. Finally, a dynamic entropy-aware soft-reweighting intervention improves Qwen3-8B-Base from 34.39 to 37.40 held-out average in the strongest setting. These findings suggest that attention entropy reveals optimization-relevant structure in token-level RL signals, and that uniform token averaging can obscure meaningful heterogeneity in reasoning post-training.
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