改进大模型推理的强化学习方法,更准确地优化策略。
Multi-Step Likelihood-Ratio Correction for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

- 用多步似然比累积修正策略梯度目标
- 在多个推理任务上显著提升模型表现
- 适合需要高精度推理的AI系统开发者
具有可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)在提升大语言模型推理能力方面至关重要。然而,常用的PPO近似目标本质上是局部的,依赖于精确策略梯度目标的局部近似。这种近似虽通过降低重要性采样带来的方差提高了稳定性,但也引入了结构偏差,需依赖信任区域机制控制。本文提出N步前向迹,通过累积未来N-1个词元的联合似然比来增强PPO近似目标。基于此,我们设计了N步前向迹策略优化(NFPO),将该迹整合进掩码策略梯度框架。NFPO在标准PPO近似目标与精确策略梯度目标之间建立了连续桥梁,提供了一种可控的偏差-方差权衡机制。理论分析表明,在合理选择N的情况下,新目标能获得比标准PPO更紧的策略改进界。在多个综合性推理基准上的实验表明,NFPO持续提升性能,验证了理论结论。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) plays a pivotal role in improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, widely used PPO surrogate objectives are fundamentally local, as they rely on a local approximation of the exact policy gradient objective. While this approximation improves stability by reducing the variance induced by importance sampling, it also introduces structural bias into the surrogate objective, which must be controlled through trust region mechanisms. In this work, we introduce the $N$-step forward trace, which augments the PPO surrogate objective using the cumulative likelihood ratio of the next $N-1$ tokens. Building on this idea, we propose $N$-Step Forward-Trace Policy Optimization (NFPO), a practical RLVR algorithm that integrates the $N$-step forward trace into the masked policy gradient framework. NFPO provides a continuous bridge between the PPO surrogate objective and the exact policy gradient objective, offering a principled mechanism for controlling the bias-variance trade-off. Our theoretical analysis shows that, with an appropriate choice of $N$, the proposed objective yields a tighter policy-improvement bound than the standard PPO surrogate. Experiments on comprehensive reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that NFPO consistently improves performance, supporting our theoretical findings.
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