arXiv:2511.19355cs.LGcs.AI2025-11被引 2

用大模型自动设计强化学习奖励函数,无需人工定义指标。

Leveraging LLMs for reward function design in reinforcement learning control tasks

  • 基于大模型自动生成奖励函数,不依赖预设指标或环境代码。
  • 多轮尝试可提升成功率,低资源模型也能生成优质奖励函数。
  • 适合想降低奖励设计成本的研究者和工程团队。

强化学习中设计有效奖励函数是主要瓶颈,通常需大量人力且耗时。现有方法常依赖预评估指标、人工反馈或环境源码作为上下文。本文提出LEARN-Opt(LLM-based Evaluator and Analyzer for Reward function Optimization),一种完全自主、与模型无关的框架,仅通过系统和任务目标的文本描述即可生成、执行并评估奖励函数候选。其核心在于从描述中自主推导性能指标,实现无监督评估与选择。实验表明,LEARN-Opt性能可媲美或优于EUREKA等先进方法,且所需先验知识更少。研究发现自动奖励设计具有高方差,平均候选失败,需多轮运行才能找到最优解。此外,低阶大模型亦能生成性能媲美甚至超越大型模型的奖励函数。该成果验证了其在无需人工定义指标的前提下生成高质量奖励函数的潜力,显著降低工程负担并提升泛化能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The challenge of designing effective reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) represents a significant bottleneck, often requiring extensive human expertise and being time-consuming. Previous work and recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential for automating the generation of reward functions. However, existing methodologies often require preliminary evaluation metrics, human-engineered feedback for the refinement process, or the use of environmental source code as context. To address these limitations, this paper introduces LEARN-Opt (LLM-based Evaluator and Analyzer for Reward functioN Optimization). This LLM-based, fully autonomous, and model-agnostic framework eliminates the need for preliminary metrics and environmental source code as context to generate, execute, and evaluate reward function candidates from textual descriptions of systems and task objectives. LEARN-Opt's main contribution lies in its ability to autonomously derive performance metrics directly from the system description and the task objective, enabling unsupervised evaluation and selection of reward functions. Our experiments indicate that LEARN-Opt achieves performance comparable to or better to that of state-of-the-art methods, such as EUREKA, while requiring less prior knowledge. We find that automated reward design is a high-variance problem, where the average-case candidate fails, requiring a multi-run approach to find the best candidates. Finally, we show that LEARN-Opt can unlock the potential of low-cost LLMs to find high-performing candidates that are comparable to, or even better than, those of larger models. This demonstrated performance affirms its potential to generate high-quality reward functions without requiring any preliminary human-defined metrics, thereby reducing engineering overhead and enhancing generalizability.

强化学习大模型奖励函数自动化

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