通过截断差结果、强化好结果,提升生成质量
Truncate Bad, Upweight Good: BoN-Style Distillation via Rank-Based Classification

- 用排名截断低质量生成,只保留高分项并动态加权
- 在多个数据集上达到与强基线相当的生成效果
- 适合需要高效生成且对质量要求高的场景
推理时选择方法(如 Best-of-N)通过采样候选并根据奖励模型选择最优完成来提升生成质量。知识蒸馏旨在将此过程转化为单一策略:用组内排名替代原始奖励,学习一个对高排名生成加权的策略。然而,现有基于排名的策略通常采用平滑全支持重加权,导致低排名生成虽被降权但仍保留在支持集中。更尖锐的重加权虽能减少尾部概率,却也加剧了对单个奖励模型顶部排名的脆弱依赖。本文提出 TUP:一种截断差结果、强化好结果的策略,将低排名生成从支持集移除,并对剩余高分项使用可调尖锐度重新加权。TUP 具有闭式、提示无关的归一化形式,可通过二元交叉熵完全离线训练,使用偏移截断胜率作为软标签,以及蒸馏目标与参考模型的对数似然比作为逻辑值。理论上,在特定假设下,我们证明对于任意未知的最优奖励函数,最佳单调排名重加权可由下尾截断规则实现,为移除低尾而非仅降权提供了理论支持。实验表明,TUP 在多个数据集上表现媲美强基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Inference-time selection methods, such as Best-of-N, improve generation by sampling a pool of candidates and selecting the top-ranked completion according to a reward model. Distillation seeks to amortize this procedure into a single policy by replacing raw rewards with in-pool ranks and learning a policy that upweights higher-ranked completions. However, existing rank-based policies typically use smooth full-support reweighting, so low-ranked completions receive less mass but remain in the target support. Although a sharper reweighting reduces lower-tail mass, it also increases reliance on brittle ranking at the top made by a single reward model. We propose TUP: a Truncate-bad, Upweight-good Policy that removes low-ranked completions from the support and reweights only the retained upper tail with a tunable sharpness. TUP admits a closed-form, prompt-independent normalization and can be trained fully offline via binary cross-entropy, using shifted-truncated win-rates as soft labels and distilled-to-reference log-likelihood ratios as logits. Theoretically, under certain assumptions, we show that for any unknown oracle reward, the best monotone rank-reweighting can be matched by a lower-tail truncation rule, providing formal support for removing the lower tail rather than merely downweighting it. Empirically, we show that TUP is competitive with strong offline alignment baselines.
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