提出新目标提升大模型强化训练的推理性能,解决训练与部署不一致问题。
The Mirage of Optimizing Training Policies: Monotonic Inference Policies as the Real Objective for LLM Reinforcement Learning

- 以推理端表现为准优化训练策略,确保更新真正提升部署效果。
- 在高差异场景下,推理性能平均提升12.3%,训练更稳定。
- 适合关注大模型训练稳定性和实际部署效果的研究者。
强化学习(RL)在大语言模型(LLM)后训练中日益重要,但训练过程仍易出现不稳定或崩溃。主要原因在于训练-推理不匹配:为兼顾生成效率与训练精度,模型在训练和推理时使用不同的引擎,导致相同轨迹的概率不一致,即使参数同步也存在差异,从而产生持续存在的离策略问题并污染训练。现有工作虽尝试缓解此问题以稳定训练策略,但忽略了关键目标错位——训练端策略的有效更新未必带来推理端策略的改进。本文指出这一被忽视的问题,提出新的优化目标:单调推理策略改进(MIPI),并设计两阶段框架MIPU,通过采样器参考候选更新,并利用推理端差距代理选择同步候选。在两种模型规模、高不匹配条件下实验表明,MIPU显著提升平均推理性能并增强训练稳定性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained growing attention in large language model (LLM) post-training, yet RL training remains fragile and can suffer from instability or collapse. One vital cause is training-inference mismatch: LLM adopts separate inference and training engines for generation efficiency and training precision, which in practice exhibits inconsistent probabilities for the same trajectories on training and inference sides, even with synchronized model parameters. This naturally induces a special type of off-policyness ever existing and poisoning the training. Prior works have made various efforts in addressing the off-policyness to stabilize the training policies under the mismatch. In this paper, we point out the objective misalignment neglected by existing works that an effective update to the policy in the training engine not necessarily ensures the improvement of the inference policy, i.e., the one used in deployment. To this end, we propose a new policy optimization objective for LLM RL, named Monotonic Inference Policy Improvement (MIPI). Following this principle, we introduce Monotonic Inference Policy Update (MIPU), a two-step LLM RL framework that constructs sampler-referenced candidate updates and selectively accepts synchronized candidates using an inference-side gap proxy. Experiments conducted on two model scales under high mismatch show that MIPU improves average reasoning performance and training stability.
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