Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Havrilla, Alex, Du, Yuqing, Raparthy, Sharath Chandra, Nalmpantis, Christoforos, Dwivedi-Yu, Jane, Zhuravinskyi, Maksym, Hambro, Eric, Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar, Raileanu, Roberta
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Havrilla, Alex
Du, Yuqing
Raparthy, Sharath Chandra
Nalmpantis, Christoforos
Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Zhuravinskyi, Maksym
Hambro, Eric
Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar
Raileanu, Roberta
author_facet Havrilla, Alex
Du, Yuqing
Raparthy, Sharath Chandra
Nalmpantis, Christoforos
Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Zhuravinskyi, Maksym
Hambro, Eric
Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar
Raileanu, Roberta
contents Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from feedback (Expert Iteration, Proximal Policy Optimization (\textbf{PPO}), Return-Conditioned RL) on improving LLM reasoning capabilities. We investigate both sparse and dense rewards provided to the LLM both heuristically and via a learned reward model. We additionally start from multiple model sizes and initializations both with and without supervised fine-tuning (\textbf{SFT}) data. Overall, we find all algorithms perform comparably, with Expert Iteration performing best in most cases. Surprisingly, we find the sample complexity of Expert Iteration is similar to that of PPO, requiring at most on the order of $10^6$ samples to converge from a pretrained checkpoint. We investigate why this is the case, concluding that during RL training models fail to explore significantly beyond solutions already produced by SFT models. Additionally, we discuss a trade off between maj@1 and pass@96 metric performance during SFT training and how conversely RL training improves both simultaneously. We then conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for RLHF and the future role of RL in LLM fine-tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning
Havrilla, Alex
Du, Yuqing
Raparthy, Sharath Chandra
Nalmpantis, Christoforos
Dwivedi-Yu, Jane
Zhuravinskyi, Maksym
Hambro, Eric
Sukhbaatar, Sainbayar
Raileanu, Roberta
Machine Learning
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (\textbf{RLHF}) has emerged as a dominant approach for aligning LLM outputs with human preferences. Inspired by the success of RLHF, we study the performance of multiple algorithms that learn from feedback (Expert Iteration, Proximal Policy Optimization (\textbf{PPO}), Return-Conditioned RL) on improving LLM reasoning capabilities. We investigate both sparse and dense rewards provided to the LLM both heuristically and via a learned reward model. We additionally start from multiple model sizes and initializations both with and without supervised fine-tuning (\textbf{SFT}) data. Overall, we find all algorithms perform comparably, with Expert Iteration performing best in most cases. Surprisingly, we find the sample complexity of Expert Iteration is similar to that of PPO, requiring at most on the order of $10^6$ samples to converge from a pretrained checkpoint. We investigate why this is the case, concluding that during RL training models fail to explore significantly beyond solutions already produced by SFT models. Additionally, we discuss a trade off between maj@1 and pass@96 metric performance during SFT training and how conversely RL training improves both simultaneously. We then conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for RLHF and the future role of RL in LLM fine-tuning.
title Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04642