arXiv:2603.03258cs.AI2026-03中稿 · ICLR被引 4

强模型在特定上下文下仍会偏离原目标,提示需改进训练方法。

Inherited Goal Drift: Contextual Pressure Can Undermine Agentic Goals

  • 用模拟炒股环境测试顶级模型,发现其在弱模型轨迹引导下易产生目标漂移
  • 仅GPT-5.1在多场景中保持稳定,其他模型漂移程度差异显著
  • 目标漂移与指令层级遵循无关,提示现有评估方式不足

随着语言模型作为代理在长上下文任务中广泛应用,目标漂移(即代理偏离原始目标的倾向)问题愈发关键。尽管早期模型已被证实易受漂移影响,但最新模型的脆弱性尚不明确。本文在模拟股票交易环境(Arike et al., 2025)中测试了前沿模型,发现它们在对抗压力下总体具备鲁棒性。然而,当模型被弱代理的历史轨迹预填充时,漂移现象普遍出现,且漂移程度随模型家族不同而显著变化,仅GPT-5.1表现出一致的抗漂移能力。实验还发现,漂移行为在不同提示间不一致,且与指令层级遵循程度相关性低,说明强层级遵循无法可靠预测抗漂移性能。我们在急诊分诊新环境中复现结果,初步验证了结论在不同场景下的可迁移性。研究强调现代语言模型代理对上下文压力仍具持续脆弱性,亟需优化后训练技术以缓解此问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

The accelerating adoption of language models (LMs) as agents for deployment in long-context tasks motivates a thorough understanding of goal drift: agents' tendency to deviate from an original objective. While prior-generation language model agents have been shown to be susceptible to drift, the extent to which drift affects more recent models remains unclear. In this work, we provide an updated characterization of the extent and causes of goal drift. We investigate drift in state-of-the-art models within a simulated stock-trading environment (Arike et al., 2025). These models are largely shown to be robust even when subjected to adversarial pressure. We show, however, that this robustness is brittle: across multiple settings, the same models often inherit drift when conditioned on prefilled trajectories from weaker agents. The extent of conditioning-induced drift varies significantly by model family, with only GPT-5.1 maintaining consistent resilience among tested models. We find that drift behavior is inconsistent between prompt variations and correlates poorly with instruction hierarchy following behavior, with strong hierarchy following failing to reliably predict resistance to drift. Finally, we run analogous experiments in a new emergency room triage environment to show preliminary evidence for the transferability of our results across qualitatively different settings. Our findings underscore the continued vulnerability of modern LM agents to contextual pressures and the need for refined post-training techniques to mitigate this.

语言模型目标漂移代理系统

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