arXiv:2607.04364cs.LG2026-07

提出CPO框架,解决持续训练中强化学习仍会遗忘旧任务的问题。

RL Forgets! Towards Continual Policy Optimization

论文配图:RL Forgets! Towards Continual Policy Optimization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于先验任务行为分布设计新目标,避免策略漂移导致遗忘。
  • 在Qwen3-VL-8B上减少13.7%遗忘,同时提升7.0%预训练能力。
  • 无需存储旧数据,适合大模型持续优化场景。

持续后训练正成为视觉语言模型适应动态任务的核心范式。近期研究更倾向使用强化学习而非监督微调,源于其被认为更抗遗忘。然而这一认知缺乏充分验证,现有证据多来自过时或同质化基准。本文在最新且多样化的多模态推理任务下重新审视该假设,提出MRCL多模态推理持续学习基准。实验表明,标准强化学习在持续后训练中仍存在严重灾难性遗忘。我们发现根源在于目标不匹配:常见策略优化中的KL正则化在当前任务数据上评估,而遗忘实际由先前任务分布上的行为漂移引起。为此,提出无重放的持续策略优化(CPO)框架,基于先验任务行为KL目标构建。通过将难以处理的历史KL约束松弛为稀疏参数移动正则化,有效限制策略漂移而不需存储旧数据。跨多个模型规模的大量实验显示,CPO始终显著降低遗忘,同时保持甚至提升预训练能力。在Qwen3-VL-8B上,遗忘减少13.7%,预训练能力提升7.0%。代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks. Recent work has increasingly favored reinforcement learning over supervised fine-tuning, driven by the belief that reinforcement learning is inherently less prone to forgetting. However, the belief remains insufficiently validated, as existing evidence is largely drawn from outdated or homogeneous benchmarks. We revisit this assumption under recent and diverse multimodal reasoning tasks. To this end, we introduce MRCL, a Multimodal Reasoning Continual Learning benchmark. Experiments on MRCL show that standard reinforcement learning still suffers from severe catastrophic forgetting during continual post-training. We trace this failure to an objective mismatch: the KL regularization used in common policy optimization methods is evaluated on current-task data, whereas forgetting is caused by behavioral drift on prior-task distributions. To address this problem, we propose Continual Policy Optimization (CPO), a replay-free framework grounded in a prior-task behavioral KL objective. CPO relaxes the intractable historical KL constraint into sparse parameter-movement regularization, limiting policy drift without storing old data. Extensive experiments across multiple model scales show that CPO consistently reduces forgetting while preserving, and in some cases improving, pretrained model capabilities. On Qwen3-VL-8B, CPO reduces forgetting by 13.7% and improves pretrained capability by 7.0%. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/MaolinLuo/CPO.

持续学习强化学习多模态模型优化

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