用离线强化学习复用专家模型的训练记忆,低成本打造通用大模型。
REGEN: Replay-recycling for Expert-to-Generalist distillation with Offline Reinforcement Learning

- 复用专家模型训练时的回放记忆,通过离线RL训练通用模型。
- 在数学推理、代码生成等任务上达到MOPD精度,成本大幅降低。
- 适合需要大规模后训练但算力有限的研究者和开发者。
大规模在线强化学习(RL)是激发大语言模型(LLMs)长程推理与代理工具使用等高级能力的主要手段。然而,在广泛的任务领域中持续扩展仍面临计算基础设施与成本挑战,尤其当RL被视为一次性学习阶段时。近期,多教师在线策略蒸馏(MOPD)被广泛用于跨领域与训练阶段的知识蒸馏,解耦了强化学习阶段,降低了成本,同时保持了广泛的泛化能力。然而,与在线RL类似,MOPD仍需耦合推理与反向传播,限制其可扩展性与计算效率。为此,我们提出REGEN:基于离线强化学习的专家到通用模型蒸馏的回放复用方法。REGEN不依赖多个教师模型,而是直接复用专家模型专业化训练过程中产生的回放记忆——这一免费副产品,并结合离线强化学习算法训练通用模型。该方法彻底解耦了采样与反向训练过程,显著降低训练成本。在数学推理、代码生成与指令遵循任务中,REGEN以更低成本达到与MOPD相当的准确率。它可能将在线RL转变为数据生成过程,而非一次性学习阶段,可拓展至无需高算力的大规模后训练。代码已开源:https://github.com/yunjie-sysu/REGEN。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large-scale online reinforcement learning (RL) is the predominant means of eliciting advanced abilities including long-term reasoning and agentic tool use in large language models (LLMs). However, continuing to scale it across vast task domains of interest remains challenging in both computational infrastructure and cost, especially when considering RL as merely a one-off learning stage. Recently, a widely used technique for distilling knowledge across various domains and training stages, multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD), helps to decouple the RL stage, saving costs, while maintaining generality across vast domains. Nonetheless, similar to online RL, MOPD requires coupled inference and backward passes, which continues to limit its scalability and computational efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose REGEN: Replay-recycling for Expert-to-Generalist Distillation with Offline RL. Instead of distilling from multiple teacher models, REGEN trains a generalist by simply recycling the replay memory -- the free by-product of the teachers' specialized RL training -- and employing offline RL algorithms. REGEN completely decouples the rollout sampling from the backward training process and thus greatly reduces the training cost. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, REGEN matches the accuracy of MOPD at substantially lower cost. It potentially turns online RL into a data synthesis process instead of a one-off learning stage, and can be extended to large-scale post-training without requiring heavy computational load. Code is available at https://github.com/yunjie-sysu/REGEN.
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