用奖励不确定性诱导强化学习中的多样行为,不损失性能。
Using Reward Uncertainty to Induce Diverse Behaviour in Reinforcement Learning

- 将奖励设为分布,让智能体在不确定中自然产生多样性
- 实验证明可保持高期望奖励的同时实现可控多样性
- 适合需要探索多解的复杂任务,如语言模型微调
传统强化学习追求最大化标量奖励的确定性策略。但在语言模型微调或科学发现等现代应用中,需要行为多样性。现有方法如熵正则化或多样性奖励常需脆弱权衡,牺牲性能换取随机性,或依赖易错的启发式指标。本文认为,多样性是面对奖励不确定性时的理性响应——当奖励函数不完全已知(如偏好模糊或奖励模型不完善)时,选择单一动作可能次优。为此,我们提出将标量奖励替换为奖励函数分布,并对动作集采用非线性目标函数。该框架使校准后的多样性自然涌现,可通过奖励分布控制,且不降低期望奖励。在上下文老虎机设置下,我们推导出该目标的合理梯度估计器,并证明其天然推广了标准策略梯度与近期动作集方法。实验表明,该框架为传统强化学习无法诱导足够行为广度的复杂任务提供了鲁棒且理论扎实的替代方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Classical reinforcement learning (RL) typically seeks a deterministic policy that maximizes the expected sum of a scalar reward. Yet, modern applications such as language model fine-tuning or scientific discovery demand diversity. Existing remedies such as entropy regularization or diversity bonuses often require fragile trade-offs that sacrifice performance for stochasticity or rely on heuristic metrics that can misalign policy rankings. We argue that diversity is more naturally understood as the rational response to uncertainty in the reward. When the reward function is not perfectly known--as is the case with ambiguous preferences or imperfect reward models--committing to a single action can be sub-optimal. Building on this, we propose a fundamental reformulation of the RL objective by replacing the scalar reward with a distribution over reward functions, and applying a non-linear objective over sets of actions. The result is a framework in which calibrated behavioural diversity emerges naturally, remains controllable through the reward function distribution, and is obtained without sacrificing expected reward. Focusing on the contextual bandit setting, we derive a principled gradient estimator for this objective and prove that our formulation naturally generalizes both vanilla policy gradient and more recently developed action-set approaches. Our empirical results demonstrate that this framework offers a robust and theoretically grounded alternative for complex RL tasks where the traditional formulation of the problem fails to induce the desired breadth of agent behaviour.
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