让语言模型在推理时同时输出答案和可信度,提升准确性与可信度一致性。
Beyond Binary Rewards: Training LMs to Reason About Their Uncertainty
- 用二元正确性奖励外加贝里评分,联合优化回答准确性和可信度估计。
- 实验显示在多个数据集上,模型准确率不变但校准度显著提升。
- 测试时可按可信度加权融合结果,进一步提高准确性和可靠性。
当语言模型通过强化学习生成自然语言推理链时,其在复杂问答任务上的表现会提升。然而,当前大多数成功应用均采用二元奖励函数,仅判断输出对错,不惩罚低置信度或猜测性输出,导致模型校准能力下降,错误生成(幻觉)率上升。本文提出RLCR(校准奖励强化学习),训练模型在推理后同时输出预测结果和数值可信度。该方法使用包含二元正确性评分和贝里评分的奖励函数,后者是一种鼓励校准预测的评分规则。我们证明,任何基于有界正则评分规则的奖励函数都能使模型兼具高准确率和良好校准性。实验证明,在多种数据集上,RLCR在保持准确率的同时显著提升校准度,优于传统强化学习及事后校准分类器。此外,测试时可通过可信度加权策略进一步优化性能。结果表明,显式优化校准能构建更可靠的推理模型。代码与模型详见 https://rl-calibration.github.io/。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications of RL for reasoning use binary reward functions that evaluate the correctness of LM outputs. Because such reward functions do not penalize guessing or low-confidence outputs, they often have the unintended side-effect of degrading calibration and increasing the rate at which LMs generate incorrect responses (or "hallucinate") in other problem domains. This paper describes RLCR (Reinforcement Learning with Calibration Rewards), an approach to training reasoning models that jointly improves accuracy and calibrated confidence estimation. During RLCR, LMs generate both predictions and numerical confidence estimates after reasoning. They are trained to optimize a reward function that augments a binary correctness score with a Brier score -- a scoring rule for confidence estimates that incentivizes calibrated prediction. We first prove that this reward function (or any reward function that uses a bounded, proper scoring rule) yields models whose predictions are both accurate and well-calibrated. We next show that across diverse datasets, RLCR substantially improves calibration with no loss in accuracy, on both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations -- outperforming both ordinary RL training and classifiers trained to assign post-hoc confidence scores. While ordinary RL hurts calibration, RLCR improves it. Finally, we demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be leveraged at test time to improve accuracy and calibration via confidence-weighted scaling methods. Our results show that explicitly optimizing for calibration can produce more generally reliable reasoning models. Code, models, and further info is available at https://rl-calibration.github.io/.
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