arXiv:2507.20150cs.AIcs.CL2025-07被引 4

揭示大模型奖励-策略映射的不稳定性根源,统一解释误导推理等安全问题。

The Policy Cliff: A Theoretical Analysis of Reward-Policy Maps in Large Language Models

  • 从奖励到策略的映射存在多解性,导致策略脆弱。
  • 多奖励场景下,有效奖励聚合机制决定策略稳定性。
  • 熵正则化可提升稳定性,但会增加行为随机性,适合安全敏感场景。

强化学习在塑造大语言与推理模型行为中至关重要,但常导致策略脆弱不稳定,引发虚假推理、欺骗对齐和指令违抗等问题,损害模型可信度与安全性。现有方法缺乏统一理论解释,多依赖经验性技巧。本文提出严谨数学框架,分析奖励函数到最优策略映射的稳定性。研究表明,策略脆弱性常源于多个有效推理路径并存时的最优动作非唯一性。该理论统一解释了多种看似无关的失败现象,将其视为在奖励不完整或含噪情况下优化的理性结果,尤其在动作退化情形下更显著。研究拓展至跨领域的多奖励强化学习,揭示稳定性由“有效奖励”聚合机制决定。同时证明熵正则化可恢复策略稳定性,代价是增加随机性。框架成功解释了近期关于欺骗性推理、指令遵循权衡及RLHF引发的狡辩现象,并通过多奖励强化学习扰动实验验证。本工作将策略稳定性分析从经验启发推进至系统性理论,为构建更安全可靠的AI系统提供关键洞见。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement learning (RL) plays a crucial role in shaping the behavior of large language and reasoning models (LLMs/LRMs). However, it often produces brittle and unstable policies, leading to critical failures such as spurious reasoning, deceptive alignment, and instruction disobedience that undermine the trustworthiness and safety of LLMs/LRMs. Currently, these issues lack a unified theoretical explanation and are typically addressed using ad-hoc heuristics. This paper presents a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing the stability of the mapping from a reward function to the optimal policy. We show that policy brittleness often stems from non-unique optimal actions, a common occurrence when multiple valid traces exist in a reasoning task. This theoretical lens provides a unified explanation for a range of seemingly disparate failures, reframing them as rational outcomes of optimizing rewards that may be incomplete or noisy, especially in the presence of action degeneracy. We extend this analysis from the fundamental single-reward setting to the more realistic multi-reward RL across diverse domains, showing how stability is governed by an "effective reward" aggregation mechanism. We also prove that entropy regularization restores policy stability at the cost of increased stochasticity. Our framework provides a unified explanation for recent empirical findings on deceptive reasoning, instruction-following trade-offs, and RLHF-induced sophistry, and is further validated through perturbation experiments in multi-reward RL. This work advances policy-stability analysis from empirical heuristics towards a principled theory, offering essential insights for designing safer and more trustworthy AI systems.

强化学习大模型安全奖励建模策略稳定性

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