arXiv:2510.13036cs.AIcs.LG2025-10被引 1

用人类偏好修复错误奖励函数,少用反馈就能让智能体更听话。

Repairing Reward Functions with Feedback to Mitigate Reward Hacking

  • 通过人类偏好学习修正项,自动优化已有奖励函数。
  • 仅需少量偏好反馈,就可将低效策略提升至最优水平。
  • 适合想低成本改进现有强化学习系统的研究者和工程师。

为强化学习智能体设计的人类奖励函数常与真实目标不一致,导致奖励黑客行为。现有基于人类反馈的强化学习虽能从零学习奖励函数,但数据收集成本高。为此,本文提出基于偏好的奖励修复(PBRR)框架:通过学习一个加性、状态转移相关的修正项,自动修复人工指定的代理奖励函数。在表格化环境中,PBRR的累积遗憾与以往基于偏好的方法相当。在多个奖励黑客基准测试中,PBRR显著优于从零学习或传统修改方法,且所需人类偏好数量大幅减少,能以极少反馈实现高性能策略。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces reward hacking, resulting in a policy misaligned with the human's true objectives. An alternative is to perform RL from human feedback, which involves learning a reward function from scratch by collecting human preferences over pairs of trajectories. However, building such datasets is costly. To address the limitations of both approaches, we propose Preference-Based Reward Repair (PBRR): an automated iterative framework that repairs a human-specified proxy reward function by learning an additive, transition-dependent correction term from preferences. A manually specified reward function can yield policies that are highly suboptimal under the ground-truth objective, yet corrections on only a few transitions may suffice to recover optimal performance. To identify and correct for those transitions, PBRR uses a targeted exploration strategy and a new preference-learning objective. We prove in tabular domains PBRR has a cumulative regret that matches, up to constants, that of prior preference-based RL methods. In addition, on a suite of reward-hacking benchmarks, PBRR consistently outperforms baselines that learn a reward function from scratch from preferences or modify the proxy reward function using other approaches, requiring substantially fewer preferences to learn high performing policies.

强化学习奖励修复人类反馈奖励黑客

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