TAPO:通过构建微反射修正轨迹改进自蒸馏的强化学习方法
阅读原文· arxiv.org针对自蒸馏仅通过隐式 logit 对齐最小化 KL 散度、缺乏对模型具体错误诊断的问题,论文提出轨迹增强策略优化(TAPO)。TAPO 在 RL 训练中让模型对同一查询同时生成正确与错误的 rollout,利用对比结构构造微反射修正轨迹:保留错误推理至失败点,插入自然语言诊断与正确参考引导的修正推理。此外引入难度感知候选选择和解耦优势估计。在 AIME 2024、AIME 2025 和 HMMT 2025 上,TAPO 相同时训练步数下较 GRPO 获得持续改进。
Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.