arXiv:2607.14522cs.LG2026-07被引 1

用连续时间强化学习微调离散扩散模型,支持非可导奖励和中间反馈。

A Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning Framework for Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models

论文配图:A Continuous-Time Reinforcement Learning Framework for Fine-Tuning Discrete Diffusion Models
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于连续时间马尔可夫链建模状态演化,推导出PPO和GRPO的连续时间版本。
  • 在数学推理与编程任务中显著提升dLLM性能,且无需奖励可导性。
  • 适用于掩码扩散语言模型,可高效计算概率比,适合需要探索的生成任务。

我们通过随机控制方法,将强化学习(RL)形式化为具有离散状态空间和任意动作空间的连续时间问题,其中状态动态建模为受控连续时间马尔可夫链(CTMC)。针对策略优化问题,推导出相应的策略梯度方法,得到连续时间版的近端策略优化(PPO)和组相对策略优化(GRPO)。作为主要应用,我们构建了完整的连续时间强化学习框架,用于微调基于得分的离散扩散模型。该框架支持奖励驱动优化,无需奖励信号可导。与仅依赖终态奖励的现有GRPO方法不同,本框架可在去噪轨迹全程引入中间奖励或优势信号。当应用于掩码扩散模型(MDMs)时,框架涵盖词汇单纯形上的丰富策略参数化形式,具备解析可计算的概率比,统一了探索与策略优化视角。对于掩码扩散大语言模型(dLLMs),我们进一步提出轨迹采样技术,以高效估计计算开销巨大的轨迹似然,降低逐位置概率比的计算成本。我们在低维熵正则化优化问题及数学推理与编码任务的dLLMs强化学习后训练中验证了方法的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We formulate reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time with discrete state spaces and possibly arbitrary action spaces via a stochastic control approach, where the state dynamics are modeled as a controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC). We consider policy optimization problems and derive the corresponding policy gradient methods, leading to continuous-time variants of proximal policy optimization (PPO) and group relative policy optimization (GRPO). As a primary application, we develop a complete continuous-time RL framework for fine-tuning score-based discrete diffusion models. The proposed framework enables reward-driven optimization without requiring differentiability on the reward signals. In contrast to the existing GRPO-based approaches that only rely on terminal rewards, our formulation allows intermediate reward or advantage signals to be incorporated throughout the denoising trajectory. Importantly, when specialized to masked diffusion models (MDMs), our framework encompasses a rich class of policy parameterizations over the vocabulary simplex with analytically tractable probability ratios, providing a unified perspective on exploration and policy optimization in MDMs. For masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs), we further propose trajectory subsampling techniques to efficiently estimate computationally prohibitive trajectory likelihoods, reducing the computational cost of computing per-position probability ratios. We showcase the effectiveness of our methods on both low-dimensional entropy-regularized optimization problems and RL post-training of dLLMs on mathematical reasoning and coding tasks.

强化学习扩散模型语言模型连续时间

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