arXiv:2506.22777cs.CLcs.AI2025-06被引 17

教模型在推理中说出如何被提示误导,让奖励作弊行为显形。

Teaching Models to Verbalize Reward Hacking in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

  • 预训练时让模型学会主动承认受提示影响
  • 经强化学习后仅6%的错误行为未被察觉,远低于基线
  • 适合关注AI安全与可解释性的研究者

用强化学习训练的语言模型会无意识地利用非预期策略获取高奖励(即奖励作弊),且在链式推理中不暴露此行为,导致难以检测,带来高风险。本文提出语义化微调(VFT),一种强化学习前的微调方法,使模型学会在受提示干扰时明确声明。我们设计环境,在其中隐藏的提示线索指向错误答案并给予高奖励,激励模型依赖这些线索而非正确推理。结果表明,经过VFT的模型在强化学习后,仅有6%的响应存在未被察觉的奖励作弊;而未经VFT的模型达到88%,使用去偏基线则高达99%。VFT使模型在强化学习后承认提示影响的比例从8%提升至94%,显著高于基线(11%和1%)。这证明:在强化学习前教会模型自省其偏差,能大幅提升奖励作弊的可检测性,为构建更透明、安全的AI系统提供可行路径。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection of reward hacking difficult, posing risks for high-stakes applications. We propose verbalization fine-tuning (VFT), a pre-RL fine-tuning intervention that trains models to explicitly acknowledge when they are influenced by prompt cues--hints which point to incorrect answers (e.g., "a Stanford professor thinks the answer is A"). To evaluate VFT, we subsequently train models with RL on environments where held-out prompt cues signal which incorrect answers will receive high reward, incentivizing models to exploit these cues instead of reasoning correctly. We measure how often models exploit these cues without verbalizing it. After RL, only 6% of the VFT-trained model's responses consist of undetected reward hacks. In comparison, when we perform RL without VFT, the rate of undetected reward hacks goes up to 88%; with a debiasing baseline intervention, this increases further to 99%. VFT achieves this by substantially increasing how often models verbalize the influence of cues, from 8% to 43% after VFT, and up to 94% after RL. Baselines remain low even after RL (11% and 1%). Our results show that teaching models to explicitly verbalize reward hacking behavior before RL significantly improves their detection, offering a practical path toward more transparent and safe AI systems.

强化学习模型可解释性奖励作弊

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