SPIRAL: Learning to Search and Aggregate

LLM Latent Reasoning CoT ML RL PGPO
语言模型的推理能力可在测试阶段通过“支架式”(scaffolded)方法得到显著提升——该方法将推理计算资源灵活分配至三类不同推理原语:单条推理轨迹内的序列式推理、多条独立采样的并行推理轨迹,以及对多条推理轨迹进行聚合以生成最终答案。然而,在后训练阶段,语言模型仅针对单条轨迹内的序列式推理进行优化。为此,我们提出“序列—并行—聚合式强化学习”(Sequential-Parallel-Aggregative Reinforcement Learning, SPIRAL)框架,使语言模型在统一的推理计算流水线中协同运用全部三类原语。具体而言,模型首先并行采样一组相互独立的推理轨迹,每条轨迹均通过序列化的思维链(chain-of-thought)推理生成;随后,模型基于这组轨迹生成一条最终的聚合轨迹;整个流程——包括并行采样、序列推理与聚合生成——均以最终聚合结果所获得的奖励为优化目标,进行端到端联合训练。为实现该训练目标,SPIRAL采用集合强化学习(set reinforcement learning)策略,指导模型生成一组在整体上对聚合器最具价值的推理轨迹;同时辅以标准强化学习方法,训练模型更有效地将该轨迹集合聚合为质量更高的最终答案。我们在多项推理任务上的实验表明,SPIRAL能高效利用推理计算资源,其扩展效率相较GRPO最高提升达11倍,且当同步扩展全部三类计算原语时,性能提升高达15%。
Language model reasoning can be substantially improved at test time via scaffolds that scale inference compute across different primitives -- sequential reasoning within a trace, independently sampled parallel traces, and aggregation of multiple reasoning traces into a final response. During post-training, however, language models are optimized only for sequential reasoning within a single trace. We introduce Sequential-Parallel-Aggregative Reinforcement Learning (SPIRAL), a framework in which a language model is trained to use all three primitives, as part of a unified inference compute pipeline. Concretely, the language model first samples a set of independent traces in parallel, each produced through sequential chain-of-thought reasoning, and then generates a final aggregation trace conditioned on those traces; all components are optimized end-to-end against the reward of the final aggregated response. To train this system, SPIRAL uses set reinforcement learning to teach models to produce a set of traces that are collectively useful for an aggregator and standard reinforcement learning to teach models to aggregate the set into improved final responses. Our experiments on reasoning tasks show that SPIRAL effectively scales with inference compute, outperforming GRPO by up to 11$\times$ scaling efficiency and 15% higher performance when all three compute primitives are scaled.
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