arXiv:2605.10716cs.LGstat.ML2026-05

针对测试时最优选择,提出能高效优化长尾奖励的后训练方法

What should post-training optimize? A test-time scaling law perspective

论文配图:What should post-training optimize? A test-time scaling law perspective
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用小规模采样外推奖励分布上尾,替代大样本直接评估
  • 在不同模型和数据集上,显著提升最佳N选一的性能
  • 适合计算资源受限但需高精度推理的部署场景

大型语言模型越来越多地采用测试时策略:对每个提示生成N个响应,用奖励模型或验证器评分,返回最优结果。这种部署方式暴露了后训练目标的不匹配:标准训练目标优化单次响应的平均奖励,而最佳N选一的表现取决于奖励分布的上尾。现有测试时感知的目标部分缓解了这一问题,但通常假设训练与部署使用相同的每提示采样预算,这在后训练需覆盖大量提示而部署可分配更大每提示计算资源时并不现实。本文研究预算不匹配情形,即训练时每提示仅可用m≪N次采样,但目标是部署时的最佳N选一表现。在奖励尾部结构假设下,我们证明最佳N选一的策略梯度可通过更小的采样组外推上尾统计量近似。由此提出一类尾部外推估计器:简单直接估计器、尾部外推优势(TEA),以及基于矩抵消的固定阶无偏前缀-TEA估计器。在指令遵循任务上的实验表明,无论模型、奖励模型、数据集或训练/测试预算设置如何,TEA与前缀-TEA均能有效提升最佳N选一的性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models are increasingly deployed with test-time strategies: sample $N$ responses, score them with a reward model or verifier, and return the best. This deployment rule exposes a mismatch in post-training: standard objectives optimize the mean reward of a single response, whereas best-of-$N$ performance is governed by the upper tail of the reward distribution. Recent test-time-aware objectives partly address this mismatch, but typically assume that training can use the same per-prompt rollout budget as deployment, which is impractical when post-training must cover many prompts while deployment can allocate much larger per-prompt test-time compute. We study this budget-mismatch regime, where only $m\ll N$ per-prompt rollouts are available during training but the target objective is best-of-$N$ deployment. Under structural assumptions on the reward tails, we show that the policy gradient of the best-of-$N$ objective can be approximated from a much smaller rollout group by extrapolating upper-tail statistics. This yields a family of Tail-Extrapolated estimators for best-of-$N$-oriented post-training: a simple direct estimator, Tail-Extrapolated Advantage (TEA), and a fixed-order debiased Prefix-TEA estimator based on moment cancellation. Experiments on instruction-following tasks show that TEA and Prefix-TEA improve best-of-$N$ performance across different language models, reward models and datasets under various training and test-time budget settings.

后训练测试时优化奖励建模长尾分布

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