arXiv:2607.16205cs.AI2026-07

用8个词的辅助分支扩展探索,让大模型推理更准更快

It Takes 8 Tokens: Weak-to-Strong Off-Policy RL via Auxiliary Branches

论文配图:It Takes 8 Tokens: Weak-to-Strong Off-Policy RL via Auxiliary Branches
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用弱模型生成短辅助片段(仅8词)插入主模型推理路径
  • 在相同采样预算下,数学推理准确率提升至64.2%,训练快3.55倍
  • 适合想提升大模型推理能力又受限于计算资源的研究者

基于可验证奖励的强化学习已成为提升大语言模型推理能力的标准方法,通常通过对比多个自生成轨迹来优化策略。然而,我们发现该范式存在关键瓶颈:在复杂推理任务中,目标模型的样本常出现语义冗余,收敛至同一错误的“推理盆地”,导致策略更新缺乏有效奖励对比。本文提出一种弱到强学习范式,利用一个较弱但计算高效的辅助模型指导探索。我们提出W2SPO,一种离策略强化学习方法,将短辅助片段(通常仅8个词)注入目标模型的中间推理路径,由目标模型从这些偏离状态继续完成推理。策略更新仅基于这些插入片段,并依据最终可验证奖励进行。实验表明,在40亿参数模型上,W2SPO在数学推理基准上表现优于所评估的后训练基线。与标准GRPO相比,在相同采样预算下,其Pass@1从62.3%提升至64.2%,训练速度提升3.55倍。结果表明,弱辅助分支可通过扩展局部探索支持,诱导更强的目标推理策略。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a standard approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models, which typically optimizes the policy by contrasting multiple self generated rollouts. However, we identify a critical support limited bottleneck in this paradigm: on challenging reasoning tasks, the target model's samples often exhibit semantic redundancy, converging into the same erroneous "reasoning basins" that offer negligible reward contrast for policy updates. In this paper, we propose to overcome this limitation through a weak to strong learning paradigm, where a policy's exploration is informed by a weaker but computationally efficient auxiliary model. We introduce W2SPO, an off policy RL method that injects short auxiliary segments often as brief as 8 tokens into intermediate target model trajectories and the target model then completes the reasoning path from these diverted states. Policy updates are restricted to these short inserted segments based on final verifiable rewards. Empirically, W2SPO achieves superior performance among evaluated 4B scale models on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, outperforming evaluated post trained baselines. Compared with vanilla GRPO under the same sampling budget, W2SPO improves Pass@1 from 62.3% to 64.2% while achieving a 3.55 times training speedup. These results suggest that weak auxiliary branches can induce stronger target reasoning policies by expanding local exploration support.

强化学习推理增强高效训练

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