用轨迹对齐系数优化奖励函数设计,提升效率与效果。
The Trajectory Alignment Coefficient in Two Acts: From Reward Tuning to Reward Learning
- 引入轨迹对齐系数(TAC)评估奖励函数与专家偏好匹配度。
- 人机实验表明使用TAC可降低认知负担并提升策略性能。
- 提出Soft-TAC作为可微损失函数,实现奖励模型直接学习。
强化学习的成功依赖于准确反映任务目标的奖励函数,但其设计耗时且易出错。本文首先研究如何辅助实践者合理设置奖励权重,引入轨迹对齐系数(TAC)衡量奖励函数诱导的偏好与领域专家的一致性。在Lunar Lander任务上的人机实验显示,使用TAC能生成性能更优的奖励函数,并显著降低使用者的认知负荷。然而,手动设计仍繁琐,因此第二步提出基于人类偏好数据训练奖励模型的方法——Soft-TAC,即TAC的可微近似,可作为损失函数直接优化。在Gran Turismo 7赛车模拟器中验证,采用Soft-TAC训练的模型能捕捉特定偏好目标,生成的行为差异更明显,优于标准交叉熵损失训练的模型。结果表明TAC既可用于引导奖励调优,也可作为复杂场景下的奖励学习目标。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The success of reinforcement learning (RL) is fundamentally tied to having a reward function that accurately reflects the task objective. Yet, designing reward functions is notoriously time-consuming and prone to misspecification. To address this issue, our first goal is to understand how to support RL practitioners in specifying appropriate weights for a reward function. We leverage the Trajectory Alignment Coefficient (TAC), a metric that evaluates how closely a reward function's induced preferences match those of a domain expert. To evaluate whether TAC provides effective support in practice, we conducted a human-subject study in which RL practitioners tuned reward weights for Lunar Lander. We found that providing TAC during reward tuning led participants to produce more performant reward functions and report lower cognitive workload relative to standard tuning without TAC. However, the study also underscored that manual reward design, even with TAC, remains labor-intensive. This limitation motivated our second goal: to learn a reward model that maximizes TAC directly. Specifically, we propose Soft-TAC, a differentiable approximation of TAC that can be used as a loss function to train reward models from human preference data. Validated in the racing simulator Gran Turismo 7, reward models trained using Soft-TAC successfully captured preference-specific objectives, resulting in policies with qualitatively more distinct behaviors than models trained with standard Cross-Entropy loss. This work demonstrates that TAC can serve as both a practical tool for guiding reward tuning and a reward learning objective in complex domains.
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