长程 RL 要修状态分布漂移：清华 AIR+Seed TAPO，数学最高 +48%、代码约 +12%

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Abstract:Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Yet long-horizon autoregressive rollouts introduce a fundamental limitation: local policy mismatch can compound into severe state distribution shift over trajectories. Existing LLM RL methods, such as GRPO and GSPO, control policy mismatch at the token or sequence level, but overlook this trajectory-induced shift, causing training instability and eventual collapse as the horizon grows. To close the state distribution gap, we propose Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (TAPO), a principled framework that theoretically derives the state-distribution correction from the off-policy policy gradient and incorporates it into the RL objective. TAPO further employs a geometric-mean estimator for variance reduction, together with a length-aware dynamic clipping that prevents overly deviated updates across the trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TAPO significantly surpasses existing LLM RL algorithms across eight competition-level benchmarks, achieving up to 48% and 12% improvement over GRPO on mathematical reasoning and algorithmic coding, with substantially enhanced training stability.

Submission history

From: Zhicheng Cai [view email]
[v1] Fri, 9 Oct 2026 05:22:07 UTC (4,443 KB)