arXiv:2608.24310cs.AI2026-08

无需微调教师模型,用强化学习提升小模型搜索推理能力。

OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning

论文配图:OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用现成指令模型作教师,通过位置级KL散度进行在线蒸馏。
  • 在7个问答数据集上,3B模型性能超越所有同类强化学习基线。
  • 适合资源有限但需高效推理的小模型部署场景。

小语言模型在搜索增强型推理任务中仍面临挑战。现有的在线策略蒸馏(OPD)虽具潜力,但存在两大问题:(1) 高质量多轮搜索轨迹依赖动态检索器响应,导致监督微调数据收集成本过高;(2) 专用任务训练的教师模型训练开销大,而直接使用未经任务微调的通用教师模型则受限于其性能上限并引发严重训练不稳定。本文提出 OPDSearch+,首个无需教师微调即可实现搜索增强推理的蒸馏范式。我们研究了冻结的通用指令模型作为教师在在线策略蒸馏中的作用,揭示关键洞见:教师能重塑学生策略分布,使后续强化学习收敛至单靠强化学习无法达到的更优解。第一阶段,学生与实时搜索引擎交互,并通过逐位置前向KL目标进行蒸馏,无需任务微调即可转移推理分解与证据整合能力。第二阶段,强化学习基于更丰富的行为基础对蒸馏后学生进行优化,实现远超纯强化学习从零开始训练的效果。在7个QA基准测试中,使用3B模型的OPDSearch+持续优于所有先前的3B强化学习基线,在HotpotQA上提升13.1%,在2WikiMultihopQA上提升8.5%。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Search-augmented reasoning remains difficult for small language models. On-policy distillation (OPD) from trained teachers offers a promising direction, but suffers from two issues: (1) high-quality multi-turn search trajectories depend on dynamic retriever responses, making SFT data prohibitively expensive to collect at scale; (2) task-specifically trained teachers incur substantial training cost, while directly applying OPD with an off-the-shelf teacher without task-specific fine-tuning constrains the student to the teacher's performance ceiling and suffers from severe training instability. We propose OPDSearch+, the first distillation paradigm that requires no teacher fine-tuning for search-augmented reasoning. We investigate the role of a frozen off-the-shelf instruct model as the teacher in on-policy distillation, and reveal a key insight: the teacher reshapes the student's policy distribution so that subsequent RL converges to a superior solution that RL alone cannot reach. In stage one, the student interacts with a live search engine and is distilled via a per-position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills without any task-specific teacher training. In stage two, RL refines the distilled student from a richer behavioral foundation, achieving performance that RL alone cannot reach from scratch. Across seven QA benchmarks, OPDSearch+ with a 3B model consistently outperforms all prior 3B RL baselines, achieving gains of 13.1% on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.

蒸馏强化学习小模型搜索推理

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