小模型也能高效提升推理能力,靠的是和大模型互教互学。
CoDistill-GRPO: A Co-Distillation Recipe for Efficient Group Relative Policy Optimization

- 让大小模型互相学习:小模型从大模型分布中蒸馏知识,大模型用小模型生成的推演结果优化
- 在数学基准上,小模型准确率比基线高11.6个百分点,比标准GRPO高6.0个百分点
- 大模型训练速度提升18%,适合资源有限但追求效率的场景
Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO)能有效提升语言模型的推理能力,但在小模型上因困难任务奖励稀疏而表现不佳。现有方法依赖大模型提供提示或密集奖励信号,但需额外训练大模型,增加成本。本文提出CoDistill-GRPO,通过协同蒸馏同时训练大、小模型:小模型使用在线策略蒸馏奖励学习大模型分布,大模型则利用小模型生成的推演结果并结合重要性重加权进行更新,降低推演计算开销。实验表明,在Qwen与Llama系列模型上,该方法显著提升小模型性能;以Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B为例,在Minerva数据集上准确率较基线提升11.6个百分点,较GRPO提升6.0个百分点。有趣的是,采用小模型推演训练的Qwen2.5-Math-7B大模型几乎达到标准GRPO性能,训练速度提升约18%,为大模型提供了一种高效的替代方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a powerful algorithm for improving the reasoning capabilities of language models, but often fails to improve small models due to sparse rewards on difficult tasks. Existing works mitigate this issue by leveraging a larger model, either to provide hints for rollouts or to provide dense reward signals through knowledge distillation (KD). However, this assumes the existence of such an oracle, and training one can significantly increase total training time. In this work, we propose CoDistill-GRPO, a co-distillation algorithm that simultaneously trains a large and a small model by maximizing carefully designed GRPO objectives. The two models learn from each other: the small model uses an on-policy KD reward to learn from the large model's distribution, while the large model is updated using rollouts generated by the small model with importance reweighting, reducing the computational overhead of rollout generation. We show that CoDistill-GRPO substantially improves small model performance over standard GRPO on mathematical benchmarks across both Qwen and Llama models. Specifically, with Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, we observe an accuracy increase of over 11.6 percentage points over the base model and an additional 6.0 percentage points over GRPO on the Minerva dataset. Interestingly, the larger model (Qwen2.5-Math-7B) trained with CoDistill-GRPO nearly matches standard GRPO performance despite training on small-model rollouts. This highlights CoDistill-GRPO as a cost-effective alternative to GRPO for larger models, yielding an approximate 18% speedup, which may be of independent interest.
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