通过语义遮蔽专家轨迹,让模型学会推理而非抄答案。
Hide to Guide: Learning via Semantic Masking

- 用细粒度语义遮蔽法隐藏关键信息,保留解题结构。
- 在数学、编程和智能搜索任务中准确率提升3.2点,训练快4.2倍。
- 适合需要真实推理能力的强化学习场景,无需修改奖励函数。
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)在提升语言模型的推理能力方面表现强劲,但探索效率常受限于难以获得有效奖励信号。外部专家轨迹虽可提供指导,却可能暴露验证目标相关的敏感内容,如最终答案、中间值、可执行代码或相关实体,形成“奖励劫持”漏洞,使模型通过复制轨迹而非自主推理获取奖励。现有方法多采用粗粒度截断,缺乏对隐藏内容的精准控制。为此,本文提出语义遮蔽专家策略优化(SMEPO),在保持专家分解、计划与过程结构的前提下,对关键路径中的奖励相关语义片段进行细粒度遮蔽。该方法将复杂问题转化为填空式推理:模型需沿专家路径推进,但必须自行重建缺失内容。SMEPO实现简单,无需修改奖励函数或强化学习目标。在数学、代码生成及智能搜索等多领域实验中,SMEPO相较GRPO提升准确率最高达3.2点,训练时间减少最多4.2倍。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a powerful paradigm for improving language models on reasoning-intensive tasks, but its effectiveness is often limited by exploration. For example, models often fail on hard problems, leaving little useful reward signal. External expert traces offer a natural source of guidance, yet they may also expose reward-relevant content along the critical path to the verifier target, such as final answers, intermediate values, executable implementations, or answer-related entities. This content can create an unintended reward hacking channel, allowing the policy to obtain reward by copying the trace rather than learning the underlying reasoning or agentic behavior. Existing guided-RL methods reduce this risk by using partial trajectories, but they mainly control how much expert information is shown heuristically rather than which parts should be hidden. To this end, we propose Semantic Masked Expert Policy Optimization (SMEPO), a fine-grained semantic masking strategy for expert-guided RLVR. Instead of truncating traces coarsely or revealing them unchanged, SMEPO masks reward-relevant semantic spans along the critical path while preserving the expert's decomposition, plan, and procedural structure. This turns hard problems from reasoning from scratch into a fill-in-the-blank process: the policy can follow the expert's problem-solving route, but must still reconstruct the missing values, code, or entities by itself. SMEPO is simple to apply and requires no changes to the reward function or RL objective. Across diverse domains, including math, code, and agentic search, SMEPO improves accuracy by up to 3.2 points over GRPO and reduces training time by up to 4.2x. The code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/SMEPO.
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