用世界模型替代真实环境,让科研智能体训练提速3-4倍
Scaling Automatic Research Agents via World Models
- 用世界模型代替真实环境执行,解决计算瓶颈
- 训练速度提升3-4倍,4B/9B模型超越120B大模型性能
- 适合大规模自动科研、具身智能等需要高效训练的场景
自动化实证研究是人工智能的长期目标。近年来的自动研究(AutoResearch)智能体借助现代大语言模型的能力,已具备独立设计解决方案并从执行结果中学习的能力。这一进展的核心依赖于后训练(尤其是强化学习)。本文发现,将强化学习扩展至这些智能体时存在根本性矛盾:每个研究轨迹中的智能体生成与环境执行两部分的扩展方式截然不同——生成可通过批处理共享算力,而每次执行需独占沙盒和真实机时。因此,随着轨迹规模增长,环境执行成为主要成本瓶颈。为解决此问题,本文提出世界模型强化学习(WMRL),以世界模型替代真实环境执行,消除该瓶颈。此外,世界模型可能不完美,其奖励受偏差和噪声污染。为此,我们进一步引入在线去偏和逆方差去噪两种机制,分别校正偏差与抑制噪声。理论上,我们证明了这两种改进均能严格提升收敛保证。实验表明,WMRL在多种任务与不同智能体规模下实现3-4倍加速,且性能优于标准强化学习基线。我们的后训练4B与9B智能体在保留测试集上超越48B与120B的大规模开源模型。该方法还可迁移至具身视觉-语言-动作(VLA)策略的后训练,验证了其通用性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automating empirical research is a long-standing direction of AI. Recent automatic research (AutoResearch) agents bring this goal within reach, as modern LLMs show the capability to independently implement solutions and learn from the execution outcomes. Behind these gains, post-training (especially RL) plays a central role. In this paper, we identify a fundamental tension when scaling RL for these agents: the two components of every AutoResearch trajectory (agent generation and environment execution) scale in very different manners, since all generation shares compute through batching, while each execution occupies its exclusive sandbox and real machine time. As a result, the environment execution dominates the training cost and becomes the bottleneck as trajectories grow. To resolve this tension, we propose World Model RL (WMRL), which replaces environment execution with a world model to remove this bottleneck. Additionally, the world model can be imperfect, as its rewards are corrupted by bias and noise. Therefore, we further equip WMRL with two mitigations, Online Debiasing and Inverse-Variance Denoising, which offset the bias and suppress the noise respectively. Theoretically, we prove that both mitigations of WMRL strictly improve the convergence guarantee. Empirically, WMRL accelerates training by 3-4x on various tasks at different agent scales, while exceeding the performance of standard RL baselines. Moreover, our post-trained 4B and 9B agents outperform much larger open-weight agents of 48B and 120B on held-out benchmarks. Beyond AutoResearch, WMRL also transfers to post-training embodied VLA policies, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method.
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