通过最优系数校准实现强化学习中的多Token预测联合训练
阅读原文· arxiv.org可验证奖励的强化学习已成为提升大语言模型推理能力的标准范式,而多Token预测是预训练中广泛采用的模块。当前实践通常分离两者的梯度,因为联合训练会导致性能下降。该研究从优化角度重新分析了这一问题,提出最优系数校准方法,能以极低开销在线追踪最优系数。在六个竞赛级数学推理基准测试中,OCC方法持续匹配或超越分离基线,改善了联合MTP-RL的训练性能。
Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as the standard paradigm for improving reasoning capability of large language models, while Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has been a widely adopted module in pretraining. Combining them is a natural approach, yet current RL practices detach MTP gradients because joint training degrades the performance. We revisit this failure from an optimization perspective. We show that the per-step effect of MTP on the RL objective can be decomposed into two terms: a first-order correlation and a second-order perturbation penalty. This decomposition unifies three MTP training regimes: Detach, Cross-Entropy loss, and Policy loss, and explains why each succeeds or fails. Further analysis of policy loss reveals that, although it aligns with intuition, performance still degrades: the correlation term decays while the quadratic penalty persists. Guided by the analysis, we propose Optimal Coefficient Calibration (OCC), an adaptive scheme that tracks the optimal coefficient online via a log-probability proxy at negligible cost. Across six competition-level mathematical reasoning benchmarks, OCC consistently matches or exceeds the detach baseline, delivering improved joint MTP-RL training performance.