解决大模型路由中奖励信号不一致的问题,让不同任务的反馈更公平可比。
ReCal: Reward Calibration for RL-based LLM Routing

- 分层分解奖励并估计各成分优势,提升信号清晰度
- 通过方差感知重加权和数据集归一化,降低优化偏差
- 在7个数据集上稳定提升路由效果,适合强化学习驱动的模型调度
大语言模型(LLM)路由已成为通过动态选择模型与推理策略发挥多模型互补优势的有效范式。基于强化学习(RL)的路由方法通过交互反馈优化路由策略,但面对异构任务时仍难以提供信息丰富且可比较的学习信号。实践中,多个目标(如正确性、格式行为)被合并为单一标量奖励,导致信用分配模糊和优化信号冲突。此外,奖励在实例间波动显著,部分样本产生更高或更不稳定的奖励,引发优化偏差,使模型偏好简单样本而非有信息量的样本。为此,我们提出ReCal——一种面向基于强化学习的LLM路由的奖励校准框架。首先引入组件级优势估计的分层奖励分解机制;进一步提出分布感知优化策略,通过方差感知重加权与每数据集归一化校准优化变异性。在七个数据集上的实验表明,ReCal持续提升路由性能与训练稳定性。代码已公开于https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language model (LLM) routing has emerged as an effective paradigm for leveraging the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs through dynamic model and reasoning-strategy selection. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing methods further improve routing quality by optimizing routing policies from interaction feedback. However, they still struggle to provide informative and comparable learning signals under heterogeneous tasks with varying difficulty. In practice, multiple objectives (e.g., correctness, format behavior) are aggregated into a single scalar reward, leading to ambiguous credit assignment and conflicting optimization signals. Moreover, reward signals exhibit significant variability across instances, where some instances produce higher or more variable rewards, introducing optimization bias that favors trivial samples over informative ones. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{ReCal}, a \textbf{\underline{Re}}ward \textbf{\underline{Cal}}ibration framework for RL-based LLM routing. We first introduce a hierarchical reward decomposition mechanism with component-wise advantage estimation. We further propose a distribution-aware optimization strategy that calibrates optimization variability through variance-aware reweighting and per-dataset normalization. Experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that ReCal consistently improves routing performance, and training stability over baselines. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReCal.
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