aiqbench analysis
This research introduces Influence-Guided PPO (I-PPO), a method that applies data attribution techniques to filter out noisy reasoning episodes during Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback post-training. By eliminating anti-aligned samples via gradient-based influence scores, the approach improves training efficiency and reduces unfaithful Chain-of-Thought generation without relying on external validation sets. The study highlights a critical optimization for scaling RLHF pipelines where traditional assumptions about rollout buffer quality often lead to performance degradation.
Learning from the Right Rollouts: Data Attribution for PPO-based LLM Post-Training
arXiv:2604.01597v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes frequently contain noisy or unfaithful reasoning, which can degrade model performance and slow down training. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Influence-Guided PPO (I-PPO)}, a novel framework that integrates data attribution into the RL post-training loop. By calculating an influence score for each episode using a gradient-based approximation, I-PPO identifies and eliminates episodes that are anti-aligned with a validation gradient. Our experiments demonstrate that I-PPO consistently outperforms SFT and PPO baselines. We show that our filtering process acts as an intrinsic early stopping mechanism, accelerating training efficiency while effectively reducing unfaithful CoT reasoning.
Abstract:Traditional RL algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) typically train on the entire rollout buffer, operating under the assumption that all generated episodes provide a beneficial optimization signal. However, these episodes frequently contain noisy or unfaithful reasoning, which can degrade model performance and slow down training. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Influence-Guided PPO (I-PPO)}, a novel framework that integrates data attribution into the RL post-training loop. By calculating an influence score for each episode using a gradient-based approximation, I-PPO identifies and eliminates episodes that are anti-aligned with a validation gradient. Our experiments demonstrate that I-PPO consistently outperforms SFT and PPO baselines. We show that our filtering process acts as an intrinsic early stopping mechanism, accelerating training efficiency while effectively reducing unfaithful CoT reasoning.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2604.01597 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2604.01597v2 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01597 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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