提出新方法,让大模型强化学习更省算力
PS-PPO: Prefix-Sampling PPO for Critic-Free RLHF

- 按提示采样截断点,只优化部分输入序列
- 训练耗时和显存降低70%以上,效果不下降
- 适合长推理任务的高效强化学习
大型语言模型的基于人类反馈的强化学习(RLHF)越来越多采用无需评判器的方法,作为演员-评判器训练的实用替代方案。尽管这些方法结构简单,但现有技术对轨迹中所有标记统一传播轨迹级学习信号,导致每次推演都需更新整个轨迹,造成长推理路径下巨大的优化开销,而中间前缀往往已能充分决定最终结果。本文提出前缀采样近端策略优化(PS-PPO),一种计算高效的无评判器RLHF方法,利用这一时间冗余性。PS-PPO引入基于提示的截断分布,为每条轨迹采样一个截断时间步。更新阶段仅反向传播至采样前缀,并通过重要性加权修正,使截断梯度估计器在全轨迹目标上保持无偏。在数学推理与RLHF基准测试中,PS-PPO显著降低训练计算量与峰值GPU内存,同时保持与强基线相当的准确性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Large Language Models increasingly relies on critic-free methods as a practical alternative to actor--critic training. Despite their simplicity, existing critic-free approaches propagate a trajectory-level learning signal uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. This requires full-trajectory policy updates for every rollout, leading to substantial optimization cost for long reasoning traces, even though intermediate prefixes often contain enough information to largely determine the final outcome. We propose Prefix-Sampling Proximal Policy Optimization (PS-PPO), a compute-efficient critic-free method for RLHF that exploits this temporal redundancy. PS-PPO introduces a prompt-conditioned cutoff distribution and samples a cutoff timestep for each trajectory. During the update pass, PS-PPO backpropagates only through the sampled prefix of each trajectory and applies an importance-weighting correction so that the resulting truncated gradient estimator remains unbiased with respect to the full-trajectory objective. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and RLHF benchmarks show that PS-PPO achieves large reductions in training compute and peak GPU memory, while maintaining accuracy comparable to strong critic-free baselines.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。