无需外部验证器,用模型自身梯度构建奖励,提升大模型推理能力
Verifier-Free RL for LLMs via Intrinsic Gradient-Norm Reward

- 基于模型内部梯度范数设计内在奖励信号
- 数学与代码任务上均提升准确率,最高+3.31%
- 适合无标注数据或验证器的场景,训练更稳定
尽管可验证奖励强化学习(RLVR)为大语言模型后训练提供了新路径,但其依赖黄金标签或领域特定验证器,限制了在新任务和领域的可扩展性。本文提出无需验证器的内在梯度范数奖励(VIGOR),仅使用策略模型自身生成输出。给定提示后,VIGOR采样一组完成结果,对在当前参数下使教师强制负对数似然梯度ℓ₂范数更小的输出赋予更高组内奖励。直观上,较小梯度范数表明输出与当前策略更一致,构成内在偏好信号。为使该信号适用于强化学习,我们通过√T缩放纠正平均分词级梯度的长度偏差,并采用组内排名调节以稳定不同提示间的奖励尺度。在数学推理基准上,VIGOR优于最先进的内部反馈强化学习(RLIF)基线;且仅在数学数据上训练时,也能跨域迁移至代码任务。例如,在基于Qwen2.5-7B-Base的MATH数据微调后,相比基线,平均数学准确率提升+3.31%,平均代码准确率提升+1.91%,同时训练过程更稳定。代码已开源:https://github.com/ZJUSCL/VIGOR。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising post-training paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), its dependency on the gold label or domain-specific verifiers limits its scalability to new tasks and domains. In this work, we propose Verifier-free Intrinsic Gradient-Norm Reward (VIGOR), a simple reward that uses only the policy model itself. Given a prompt, VIGOR samples a group of completions and assigns higher within-group rewards to outputs that induce smaller $\ell_2$ norms of the teacher-forced negative log-likelihood gradients under the current parameters. Intuitively, lower gradient norms suggest the completion aligns better with the current policy, serving as an intrinsic preference signal for policy optimization. To make this intrinsic signal practical for RL, we correct the systematic length bias of averaged token-level gradients with a $\sqrt{T}$ scaling, and apply group-wise rank shaping to stabilize reward scales across prompts. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks, VIGOR outperforms the state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF) baseline, and it also exhibits cross-domain transfer to code benchmarks when trained only on math data. For instance, on Qwen2.5-7B-Base post-trained on MATH, VIGOR improves the average math accuracy by +3.31% and the average code accuracy by +1.91% over this baseline, while exhibiting more stable training dynamics. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUSCL/VIGOR.
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