解决多语言问答中因英文证据导致的输出偏移问题。
Distill Where the Student Goes: Teacher-Regularized RL for English-Evidence Cross-Lingual RAG

- 用教师模型指导学生在不同输入前缀下的生成,稳定输出语言一致性。
- 在三个基准上提升语言合规性和证据关联性,最高减少27%语言漂移。
- 适合做多语言信息检索与生成任务的研究者和工程师使用。
跨语言检索增强生成(RAG)常采用英文证据模式:用户以多种语言提问,但检索到的段落仍为英文。在此设置下,即使基础模型强大,生成仍会失败:英文证据引发语言漂移(如夹杂英文或代码切换),且模型在生成非英文答案时对证据利用不充分。我们归因于两个后训练挑战:(i) 错误具有前缀依赖性,固定轨迹监督存在前缀错配;(ii) 序列级(部分离散/基于判断)奖励导致信用分配噪声大、更新方差高。提出TR-RAG,一种教师正则化的强化学习方法,将奖励优化与学生访问前缀的在线蒸馏结合。紧凑的学生模型采样在线回答,而更强的冻结教师仅在这些前缀上被查询,提供前缀级别的学生-教师反KL锚点。进一步引入奖励分解,融合语言一致性、字符三元组召回率和LLM判别评分,以衡量证据正确性。在三个基准(BioASQ-ENKB5、Hotpot-ENKB5、MKQA)及两种主干模型上,TR-RAG在语言依从性与证据可信度组合指标上超越强基线。关键的是,教师锚点起到安全网作用:在域内语言上防止语言一致性崩溃(最高达约27个百分点),避免低于基础模型表现;在远距离分布外语言上,当仅靠奖励的RL停滞于基础模型天花板时,仍能改善证据关联性;在字符三元组召回上,紧凑学生甚至超过其700亿参数教师。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cross-lingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is often deployed in an English-evidence regime, where users query in diverse languages but retrieved passages remain English. In this setting, generation can fail despite strong base models: English evidence induces language drift (English or code-switching outputs) and models use evidence unreliably when producing non-English answers. We attribute these failures to two post-training challenges: (i) errors are prefix-dependent, so fixed-trajectory supervision suffers from prefix mismatch; and (ii) sequence-level (partly discrete / judge-based) rewards yield noisy credit assignment and high-variance updates. We propose TR-RAG, a teacher-regularized RL recipe that couples reward optimization with on-policy distillation on student-visited prefixes. A compact student samples on-policy answers, while a stronger frozen teacher is queried only on those prefixes and provides a prefix-wise student-to-teacher reverse-KL anchor. We further introduce a reward decomposition for English-evidence multilingual generation, combining language consistency, character 3-gram recall, and an LLM-judge score for evidence-grounded correctness. Across three benchmarks (BioASQ-ENKB5, Hotpot-ENKB5, and naturally multilingual MKQA) and two backbones, TR-RAG improves the composite of language adherence and evidence-grounded correctness over strong baselines. Crucially, the teacher anchor acts as a safety net: on in-domain languages it prevents the large language-consistency collapses (up to ~27 percentage points) that reward-only RL can suffer by drifting below even the base model, while on distant out-of-distribution languages, where reward-only RL stalls at the base model's ceiling, it still improves evidence grounding; and on character 3-gram recall the compact student sometimes surpasses its 70B teacher.
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