arXiv:2603.27049stat.MLcs.LG2026-03中稿 · ICML

提出新机制解决AI越准人越不愿干活的难题

Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

  • 用哨兵审计机制确保人类持续投入,不随AI变强而退缩
  • 在固定预算下降低统计误差,比传统方法更优
  • 适合需要人机协作且预算有限的智能系统设计

AI辅助任务分工日益普遍,但人类努力成本高且难以观测。近期研究发现,基于准确率的支付机制存在激励崩溃问题:随着AI准确率提升,维持人类正向投入需无限支付。本文在预算受限的主从框架下研究该现象,证明仅依赖可观测任务准确率的任何支付规则都面临激励崩溃。为此,提出哨兵审计支付机制,在有限成本下始终维持可控的人类努力水平,不受AI准确率影响。在此基础上构建激励感知的主动统计推断框架,联合优化审计率与任务难度差异下的主动采样和预算分配,以最小化最终统计损失。实验表明,该方法在成本-误差权衡上优于标准主动学习与纯审计基线。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer from incentive collapse: as AI accuracy improves, sustaining positive human effort requires unbounded payments. We study this phenomenon in a budget-constrained principal-agent framework with strategic human agents whose output accuracy depends on unobserved effort. Our first contribution is a general impossibility result showing that incentive collapse is not merely a limitation of simple linear payments, but arises for any payment rule based only on observed task accuracy.To overcome this barrier, we propose a sentinel-auditing payment mechanism that enforces a strictly positive and controllable level of human effort at finite cost, independent of AI accuracy. Building on this incentive-robust foundation, we develop an incentive-aware active statistical inference framework that jointly optimizes (i) the auditing rate and (ii) active sampling and budget allocation across tasks of varying difficulty to minimize the final statistical loss under a single budget. Experiments demonstrate improved cost-error tradeoffs relative to standard active learning and auditing-only baselines.

人机协作激励机制主动学习预算优化

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。