arXiv:2605.26784cs.LGcs.AI2026-05

用比率方差正则化替代硬截断,提升强化学习稳定性和采样效率。

Ratio-Variance Regularized Policy Optimization

论文配图:Ratio-Variance Regularized Policy Optimization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过约束策略比率方差实现软信任区域,避免盲目截断高回报更新。
  • 在7个LLM规模和10个机器人任务中均显著提升性能,小模型提升更明显。
  • 适合追求稳定训练与高效采样的强化学习研究者和应用开发者。

标准的在线强化学习依赖启发式截断来维持信任区域,但这种机制会无差别地裁剪高回报但高偏离的更新,造成严重损失。我们证明,显式约束策略比率方差可提供信任区域约束的合理局部近似,无需二值硬截断。该方法作为分布上的“软刹车”,保留了来自新发现的关键梯度信号,同时自然降低并重用过时的离线数据。我们提出 ${\bf R}^2{\bf VPO}$(比率方差正则化策略优化),通过原始-对偶优化框架实现此约束。在涵盖7个大语言模型规模、快慢推理范式及10个机器人控制任务的广泛评估中,R$^2$VPO 在数学推理基准上取得显著性能提升,尤其在小模型上表现突出,同时大幅提高样本效率。此外,在连续控制领域,其在稀疏奖励和动态环境中的表现持续优于PPO基线。这些结果确立比率方差正则化为稳定且高效策略优化的理论基础。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly constraining the policy ratio variance provides a principled local approximation to trust-region constraints, eliminating the need for binary hard clipping. By acting as a distributional ``soft brake'', this approach preserves critical gradient signals from novel discoveries while naturally down-weighting and enabling the reuse of stale, off-policy data. We introduce ${\bf R}^2{\bf VPO}$ (Ratio-Variance Regularized Policy Optimization), which implements this constraint via a primal-dual optimization framework. Extensive evaluations across $7$ LLM scales, spanning both fast and slow reasoning paradigms, and $10$ robotic control tasks demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach. R$^2$VPO achieves substantial performance gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with particularly pronounced improvements on smaller models, while significantly improving sample efficiency. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms PPO baselines in continuous control domains, particularly in sparse-reward and dynamic environments. Together, these findings establish ratio-variance regularization as a principled foundation for stable and data-efficient policy optimization.

强化学习策略优化采样效率大模型

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