arXiv:2502.18770cs.LGcs.AI2025-02被引 92

提出新奖励设计方法,有效防止大模型训练中的奖励欺骗问题。

Reward Shaping to Mitigate Reward Hacking in RLHF

  • 用奖励模型中的隐式偏好作为强化学习信号
  • 在多个基线模型上显著降低奖励黑客风险
  • 适合关注对齐安全性的大模型研究者

基于人类反馈的强化学习(RLHF)广泛用于使大型语言模型(LLMs)与人类偏好对齐,但仍易受奖励黑客影响——即策略利用奖励函数缺陷而非学习正确行为,破坏对齐效果。尽管奖励塑造可部分缓解此问题,但其方法与设计原则尚未系统研究。本文全面分析主流奖励塑造技术,归纳出两条关键设计原则:(1) 强化学习奖励应有界;(2) 奖励初始增长迅速,随后逐渐饱和。据此提出新方法PAR(Preference as Reward),以奖励模型中编码的隐式偏好作为强化学习信号。实验表明,PAR具备两项方差缩减特性,稳定训练过程,并大幅扩展早期停止的可行窗口。评估包含两部分:第一,以Gemma2-2B为基底模型,UltraFeedback Binarized数据集,PPO算法对比PAR与其他塑造策略;第二,跨三种基底模型、HH-RLHF数据集及四种强化学习算法,对比PAR与未塑造奖励基线。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF remains vulnerable to \emph{reward hacking}, whereby a policy exploits imperfections in the reward function instead of learning the intended behavior, thereby undermining alignment. Although reward shaping can stabilize RLHF training and partially mitigate reward hacking, shaping methods and their underlying design principles have not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive study of prevalent reward-shaping techniques. Our analysis identifies two key design principles: (1) the reinforcement-learning reward should be bounded, and (2) it should grow rapidly at first and then gradually saturate. Motivated by these principles, we propose Preference as Reward (PAR), a novel method that uses the latent preferences encoded in the reward model as the reinforcement-learning signal. We further show that PAR possesses two variance-reduction properties that stabilize RLHF training and substantially widen the practical window for early stopping. Our evaluation consists of two parts. First, we compare PAR with several reward-shaping strategies using Gemma2-2B as the base model, UltraFeedback Binarized as the dataset, and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as the reinforcement-learning algorithm. Second, we compare PAR with the unshaped reward baseline across three base models, the HH-RLHF dataset, and four reinforcement-learning algorithms.

强化学习大模型对齐奖励塑造奖励黑客

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