arXiv:2609.02987cs.LGstat.ML2026-09

让强化学习更关注稀有高奖励结果,提升模型泛化能力。

Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning

论文配图:Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过优化奖励的上尾概率,直接提升罕见高回报样本的出现几率。
  • 在多个任务中,使用更多采样时性能显著提升,优于传统平均奖励方法。
  • 只需修改优势函数,即可兼容现有强化学习框架,适合追求鲁棒性的研究者。

强化学习通常优化平均奖励,但对生成式策略而言,平均值可能掩盖重要差异:两个策略可获得相同均值奖励,却在产生稀有高奖励轨迹的概率上截然不同。随着训练和推理阶段采样增多,这种差异变得关键——其收益依赖于保留高奖励结果的概率质量。本文提出尾部似然强化学习(Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning, TailRL),不只考虑期望奖励,而是关注所有上尾行为:对每个奖励阈值,策略超过它的概率是多少?这将连续奖励转化为一族二元成功事件。TailRL通过最大化随机选择阈值下超越该阈值的对数概率来优化策略。其梯度对稀有高奖励轨迹赋予更高权重,可解释为Best-of-(k)梯度的混合形式。该方法仅需对优势函数进行简单修改,与现有强化学习流程兼容。在物体定位、迷宫导航、GUI理解及代码优化任务中,TailRL能有效利用稀有高奖励样本,避免陷入次优解,并使模型在推理时从更多采样中获益更多。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning typically optimizes average reward. For generative policies, the average can hide an important distinction: two policies can achieve the same mean reward while having very different chances of producing a rare but high-reward rollout. This matters as sampling increases during training and inference, since its benefit depends on retaining probability mass on high-reward outcomes. We propose to optimize this coverage directly. Rather than considering only expected reward, we consider all of its upper tails: for each reward threshold, how likely is the policy to exceed it? This turns a continuous reward into a family of binary success events. We introduce Tail-Likelihood Reinforcement Learning (TailRL), which maximizes the log-probability of exceeding a randomly chosen reward threshold. Its gradient gives more weight to rare, high-reward rollouts and can be interpreted as a mixture of Best-of-(k) gradients. TailRL requires only a simple modification to the advantage function, making it compatible with existing reinforcement learning pipelines. Across object localization, maze navigation, GUI grounding, and code optimization, TailRL leverages rare high-reward training samples to avoid suboptimal solutions and yields models that benefit more from additional samples at inference time.

强化学习生成策略稀有奖励上尾优化

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