通过树形结构分配采样预算,提升大模型多步推理的强化学习效率。
TRACE: A Unified Rollout Budget Allocation Framework for Efficient Agentic Reinforcement Learning

- 将每步思维-动作视为独立节点,实现从提示到中间步骤的预算分配。
- 在相同采样成本下,使Qwen3-14B多跳问答准确率提升2.8点。
- 适合需要高效多步推理的大语言模型应用开发者。
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)是提升大语言模型推理与自主行为的有前景方法。然而,依赖大量采样的策略优化常受限于奖励对比度不足:过于简单或复杂的提示会产生低方差反馈,且仅基于结果的奖励会为多轮采样中的每个决策赋予相同终值评估。以往工作仅关注将资源分配给有潜力的提示,但忽略了同一采样中各轮次前缀的信息量差异。本文针对多轮自主强化学习,将每个ReAct风格的思维-动作-观察回合建模为语义独立节点,使预算分配从提示根扩展至各轮中间前缀及其后续延续,自然形成树状采样结构。提出树形采样预算分配框架TRACE,通过共享可泛化的预测器,基于前缀历史估计条件成功概率,在固定采样预算下增强奖励对比度。实验表明,TRACE在典型自主任务上表现优异,在等量采样成本下,使Qwen3-14B多跳问答平均准确率提升2.8个百分点。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing reasoning and agentic behavior in large language models. However, rollout-intensive policy optimization is often limited by insufficient reward contrast, arising when overly simple or complex prompts generate low-variance feedback and when outcome-only rewards assign the same terminal assessment to every decision in a multi-turn rollout. Past efforts have focused on allocating available rollout resources to promising prompts, yet they only leverage sample informativeness at the prompt level and neglect variation in prefix-level informativeness across turns within the same rollout. This work targets multi-turn agentic RL by modeling each ReAct-style thought-action-observation turn as a semantically distinct node, allowing budget allocation to extend from prompt roots to turn-level prefixes with further continuations, which naturally forms tree-structured rollouts. We introduce Tree Rollout Allocation for Contrastive Exploration (TRACE), a unified rollout allocation framework that enhances reward contrast within a fixed sampling budget. Technically, TRACE allocates rollout budget to both prompt roots and intermediate prefixes that are most likely to yield mixed terminal rewards. A shared generalizable predictor estimates conditional success probability at these anchors from prefix histories to guide this allocation. The resulting adaptive tree structure enriches outcome-only feedback and amplifies the policy-update signal. Empirically, TRACE achieves competitive performance and efficiency gains on typical agentic benchmarks, e.g., improving Qwen3-14B Multi-Hop QA average accuracy by 2.8 points over competitive baselines at equal sampling cost.
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