让大模型学会从第一次出错处获得反馈,提升推理能力。
Cliff: Learning Process Rewards from the First Mistake

- 用现成大模型识别推理中的首次错误,划分正确与错误阶段。
- 在12个场景中,比标准方法提升7%,比同类方法高15%。
- 无需特殊奖励模型,适合各类推理任务的后训练优化。
基于可验证奖励的强化学习(RLVR)已成为大语言模型后训练的重要范式,但其依赖粗粒度结果奖励,难以指导中间推理过程。现有方法如过程奖励建模和在线策略蒸馏引入额外约束,例如依赖专用奖励模型或假设教师与学生推理模式一致。我们观察到,一旦推理过程首次出错,后续推理信息价值有限,因其已基于无效前缀。为此,我们提出Cliff,一种利用现成大模型作为教师识别每条轨迹首次错误的奖励塑造策略。该策略将轨迹自然分为正确前缀和错误后缀,进而生成逐标记优势:正确部分得正向奖励,错误部分得负反馈。在12种不同场景的实验表明,Cliff持续提升推理性能,相比在线策略蒸馏提升15%,相比标准GRPO提升7%,即使使用能力一般的教师也有效。此外,我们分析了‘真实答案’在Cliff中的作用及其训练动态。结果证明Cliff是一种简单、通用且高效的改进RLVR的方法,提供更细粒度的监督信号。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for large language model (LLM) post-training, but its reliance on coarse outcome rewards leads to limited guidance on intermediate reasoning processes. Existing approaches such as process reward modeling and on-policy distillation introduce additional constraints, such as reliance on a specialized reward model or assuming identical reasoning patterns between teacher and student. Nevertheless, we observe that once a reasoning process first goes wrong, evaluating the subsequent reasoning provides limited additional information, as it is already conditioned on an invalid prefix. Therefore, we propose Cliff, a reward shaping strategy that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM as a teacher to identify the first mistake in each rollout. As a result, the rollout is naturally decomposed into two parts: a correct prefix and an incorrect suffix. Cliff then converts this signal into token-level advantages, assigning positive advantages for the correct prefix and negative feedback afterward. Experiments across 12 different scenarios demonstrate that Cliff consistently improves reasoning performance, outperforming on-policy distillation by 15% and standard GRPO by 7%, even with teachers of modest capability. Furthermore, we analyse the role of ``ground truth'' in Cliff and investigate its training dynamics. These results establish Cliff as a simple, general and effective approach for improving RLVR with richer, fine-grained supervision.
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