arXiv:2605.21266cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

用短时间在线训练+离线优化,低成本实现更优语言模型推理能力

How Much Online RL is Enough? Informative Rollouts for Offline Preference Optimization in RLVR

论文配图:How Much Online RL is Enough? Informative Rollouts for Offline Preference Optimization in RLVR
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 先用少量在线强化学习预热,生成高质量偏好数据,再离线用DPO训练
  • 在相同任务上,仅需1/4计算量就超越完整在线RL方法,最高提升10.8%
  • 关键不是数据量,而是数据的有用性:适度预热能产生更强对比信号

强化学习从可验证奖励(RLVR)已成为语言模型推理的重要范式,以GRPO为代表。但GRPO需持续在线采样,计算开销大且难扩展。虽有离线的直接偏好优化(DPO)效率高,但通常在冷启动监督微调策略生成的采样上表现逊于在线方法。本文提出G2D(GRPO to DPO)三阶段流程:短时GRPO预热、构建静态偏好数据集、离线使用DPO微调。在Qwen2.5-7B和Llama-3.1-8B上测试不同在线步数(K)发现,适度预热的离线DPO在计算成本显著更低的情况下性能相当甚至更优。在Qwen2.5-7B上,当K=150时,G2D达62.4%(MATH-500),比GRPO(51.6%)高10.8%,计算量约低4倍;在Llama-3.1-8B上,K=500时达49.4%,优于原版GRPO。性能不取决于偏好对数量(随K变化不大),而取决于其信息量:适度预热使策略不确定性校准,提供更强对比信号;过度预热则导致过自信策略与低效数据。结果表明,离线-在线差距本质是数据信息量问题,短时在线预热结合难度适配的离线数据是高效替代方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for reasoning in language models, with GRPO as its primary example. However, GRPO requires continuous online rollout generation, making it computationally expensive and difficult to scale. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers a stable and efficient offline alternative, it is typically expected to underperform w.r.t. online RL methods such as GRPO when trained on rollouts from a cold supervised fine-tuned (SFT) policy. We introduce G2D (GRPO to DPO)}, a three-stage pipeline that performs a short GRPO warm-up, constructs a static preference dataset, and fine-tunes a model offline with DPO. Across a set of values of the number of online steps (K) in GRPO on Qwen2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B, we find that offline DPO with moderate warm-up matches or outperforms GRPO at substantially lower compute cost in our setting. On Qwen2.5-7B, G2D at K=150 achieves 62.4% on MATH-500, outperforming GRPO (51.6%) by 10.8% at ~4x lower compute. On Llama-3.1-8B, G2D at K=500 achieves 49.4%, surpassing GRPO in our experimental setting. We show that performance is not governed by the number of preference pairs, which does not vary much w.r.t. K, but by their informativeness. Moderate warm-up produces rollouts with calibrated uncertainty, yielding stronger contrastive signal, while excessive warm-up leads to overconfident policies and less informative data. Our results recast the offline-online gap in RLVR as primarily a data informativeness problem, and identify short online RL warm-up with appropriate difficulty calibration of the fine-tuning dataset as a compute-efficient alternative to online RL.

强化学习离线优化语言模型高效训练

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