提出轻量级修复模型,有效抑制文生图强化学习中的奖励欺骗问题。
Understanding Reward Hacking in Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learning
- 构建小规模人工标注数据集,训练可自适应识别图像伪影的奖励模型。
- 在多个文生图强化学习设置中,显著提升图像真实感并减少奖励欺骗现象。
- 适配现有流程,作为通用正则化模块,适合图像生成与对齐优化研究者使用。
强化学习(RL)已成为大语言模型后训练的标准方法,并被用于改进图像生成模型,通过奖励函数提升生成质量与人类偏好对齐。然而,现有奖励设计常是人类判断的不完美代理,导致模型易产生看似高分但实际不真实或低质量的图像(即奖励欺骗)。本文系统分析了文本到图像(T2I)RL后训练中的奖励欺骗行为,发现美学/偏好奖励和提示-图像一致性奖励均会引发该问题,且多奖励集成仅能部分缓解。我们识别出共性失败模式:生成含伪影的图像。为此,提出一种轻量级、自适应的伪影奖励模型,基于少量精选的无伪影与含伪影样本训练。该模型可无缝集成至现有RL流程,作为常用奖励模型的有效正则化器。实验表明,引入该奖励显著提升了视觉真实感,减少奖励欺骗,验证了轻量奖励增强作为防御机制的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard approach for post-training large language models and, more recently, for improving image generation models, which uses reward functions to enhance generation quality and human preference alignment. However, existing reward designs are often imperfect proxies for true human judgment, making models prone to reward hacking--producing unrealistic or low-quality images that nevertheless achieve high reward scores. In this work, we systematically analyze reward hacking behaviors in text-to-image (T2I) RL post-training. We investigate how both aesthetic/human preference rewards and prompt-image consistency rewards individually contribute to reward hacking and further show that ensembling multiple rewards can only partially mitigate this issue. Across diverse reward models, we identify a common failure mode: the generation of artifact-prone images. To address this, we propose a lightweight and adaptive artifact reward model, trained on a small curated dataset of artifact-free and artifact-containing samples. This model can be integrated into existing RL pipelines as an effective regularizer for commonly used reward models. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating our artifact reward significantly improves visual realism and reduces reward hacking across multiple T2I RL setups, demonstrating the effectiveness of lightweight reward augment serving as a safeguard against reward hacking.
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