AutoScaffold:AI 引导的脚手架用于语言模型强化学习
AutoScaffold: AI-Guided Scaffolding for Reinforcement Learning of Language Models
Zijian Zhang, Rizhen Hu, Jiangweizhi Peng, Shiyang Li, Sujay Bhatt, Sihan Zeng, Mingyi Hong
AI 速读 基于摘要
AutoScaffold 用冻结教师模型根据学生训练经验自动设计并调整训练期脚手架,在评估时移除脚手架后仍提升多个领域的强化学习效果。
cs.LG · cs.CL
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Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) produces rich training experience, yet outcome rewards reduce each attempt to a single number and leave most of this information unused. Training-time scaffolds, such as strategies or hints added to the prompt during training, offer a natural way to turn this information into guidance, but their design and adaptation are largely left to humans and tailored to specific domains. We introduce AutoScaffold, a unified AI-for-AI framework that turns a student's training experience into adaptive scaffolds, with minimal domain-specific information and no human intervention during training. A frozen teacher periodically examines this experience, diagnoses bottlenecks, and designs scaffolds in two forms: (i) strategies shared across a class of tasks and (ii) hints for individual hard tasks, adjusting the content and amount of support as the student learns. The scaffolds are removed at evaluation. We apply the same framework to ALFWorld, search-based QA, mathematical reasoning, and GPU kernel generation. When evaluated without scaffolds, students trained with AutoScaffold outperform those trained with the corresponding RL baselines in all four domains, with gains of 7.2 points in ALFWorld success and 4.0 points in average QA exact match. On GPU kernel generation, AutoScaffold increases the fraction of tasks with a correct kernel that runs faster than the PyTorch reference by up to 5.0 points. On math, our student surpasses QuestA's reported accuracy using approximately one-third as many student training steps. Analyses show that the teacher identifies a different failure in each task class and shifts its scaffolds from step-by-step workflows to targeted fixes as the student improves, and that its revised scaffolds help the student learn more than keeping the previous scaffold or using no scaffold.