通过重塑奖励引导机制,让大模型在推理中发现新思路,同时提升多种评估指标表现。
SAGE: Shaping Anchors for Guided Exploration in RLVR of LLMs

- 设计可调节的引导函数,动态调整强化学习中的参考分布锚点。
- 在数学推理任务上实现 pass@1 与 pass@k 的同步提升,突破传统方法瓶颈。
- 适合关注大模型推理能力增强与强化学习优化的研究者。
近期研究发现,基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)能有效提升大语言模型在推理任务上的 pass@1 指标,但在 pass@k 指标上效果有限,引发质疑:RLVR 是真正提升了模型的新推理能力,还是仅优化了已有推理路径的采样效率?现有分析多支持后者,认为根源在于标准 RLVR 目标结构导致探索压力不足。本文指出,反向KL正则化虽稳定训练,但将策略锚定于参考分布,抑制了新推理模式的出现。然而,简单移除或替换为前向KL均不可行——前者引发奖励欺骗,后者将概率分配至无关区域。为此,我们提出 SAGE 框架,通过引导函数 q(x,y) 重构反向KL锚点分布,实现可控的经验支持扩展,在多个高难度数学推理基准上持续提升 pass@1 与 pass@k 表现。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Recent studies observe that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) reliably improves pass@1 on reasoning tasks, yet often fails to yield comparable gains in pass@k, raising the question of whether RLVR genuinely enables large language models to acquire novel reasoning abilities or merely enhances the efficiency of sampling reasoning modes already present in the base model. Prior analyses largely support the latter view, attributing this limitation to structural properties of standard RLVR objectives that result in insufficient exploration pressure. In this work, we argue that a central structural constraint arises from reverse-KL regularization, which stabilizes training but inherently anchors the policy to the reference distribution, thereby suppressing the emergence of alternative reasoning modes. However, we show that neither removing the KL term nor replacing it with forward-KL provides a satisfactory solution, as both disrupt the efficiency-coverage trade-off by either inducing reward hacking or allocating probability mass to off-target regions. To resolve this tension, we propose SAGE, a principled framework that enables controllable empirical support expansion by reshaping the reverse-KL anchor distribution itself through a guide function q(x,y), achieving consistent improvements in both pass@1 and pass@k across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/tally0818/SAGE.
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