通过内部自蒸馏恢复强化学习中的策略多样性,提升大模型推理能力。
Internalize the Temperature: On-Policy Self-Distillation as Policy Reheater for Reinforcement Learning

- 用高温度自蒸馏重构模型输出分布,内部化探索机制。
- 在Qwen3-4B和8B上验证,重启策略后持续强化学习效果更优。
- 无需外部数据或额外计算,适合解决熵坍缩问题的场景。
基于可验证奖励的强化学习能提升大语言模型的推理能力,但常面临熵坍缩问题:策略越来越集中,导致回放多样性下降和有效学习信号减少。现有方法要么约束强化学习目标(如熵正则化),要么在采样时调整温度,但这些干预均未融入模型参数。本文提出温度缩放的在线自蒸馏(TS-OPSD),一种轻量级策略重启方法,将温度带来的探索效应内化到模型参数中。从熵坍缩的强化学习检查点出发,通过高温度缩放自身输出对数,构建自教师模型,并将平滑后的分布蒸馏回学生模型。该方法无需外部教师、特权数据或额外推理开销。在Qwen3-4B-Base和Qwen3-8B-Base上的实验表明,策略重启相比标准持续强化学习和采样层温度重启,能提供更强的初始化。进一步分析显示,TS-OPSD主要降低输出尖锐度,同时保留中间表示、候选词集和推理能力。结果表明,熵恢复可作为应对推理导向强化学习坍缩的简单后处理干预。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards improves the reasoning ability of large language models, but often suffers from entropy collapse, in which increasingly concentrated policies reduce rollout diversity and useful learning signals. Existing remedies either constrain the RL objective (e.g., entropy regularization) or adjust sampling temperature during rollout collection, but these interventions remain external to the model parameters. We propose Temperature-Scaled On-Policy Self-Distillation (TS-OPSD), a lightweight policy reheating method that internalizes the exploratory effect of temperature into model parameters. Starting from an entropy-collapsed RL checkpoint, TS-OPSD constructs a self-teacher by applying high-temperature scaling to the model's own logits, then distills the resulting smoother distribution back into the student. This policy reheating requires no external teacher, privileged data, or additional inference cost. Experiments on Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-8B-Base show that policy reheating yields a stronger initialization for continued RL than both standard continued RL and rollout-level temperature reheating. Further analyses show that TS-OPSD mainly reduces output sharpness while preserving intermediate representations, top candidate sets, and reasoning capability. These results suggest that entropy restoration can serve as a simple post-collapse intervention for extending reasoning-oriented RL.
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