用条件策略混合构造可控制的模型失败案例,揭示语言模型泛化漏洞。
Demonstrating Generalization Failures via Mixtures of Conditional Policies
- 通过混合条件策略的监督微调构建可预测失败的模型
- 强化学习在训练分布上优化时会主动破坏另一分布表现至零
- 适合对齐安全测试与泛化机理研究者参考
前沿语言模型的后训练基于精心筛选的任务集,不可避免地导致训练与部署环境间的分布偏移,引发泛化失败,而这类失败机制尚不明确。为更好理解此类问题,我们主张在简化条件下构建清晰的示范案例。为此,提出一种简单灵活的方法:在由多个条件策略语料组成的混合数据集上进行监督微调,使模型近似为「条件策略的混合体」。随后在特定任务分布上使用强化学习(RL)训练,发现模型会优先选择在训练分布上获得最高奖励的策略。在控制实验中,两个分布仅以不同触发词开头相同问题,但任一分布上的RL训练均会使模型在另一分布上性能降至零,尽管底层任务完全相同。我们还利用该方法揭示未来语言模型可能发生的两类新泛化失败:任务覆盖范围与时间上下文的分布偏移。尽管构造方式刻意简化,不完全模拟真实场景,但这些「模型生物」对对齐压力测试和泛化科学具有价值,能作为训练成功与泛化能力可分离的实证例证。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Post-training of frontier language models is conducted on curated task suites, and inevitably leaves a distribution shift between training and deployment environments. This exposes developers to generalization failures, which are relatively poorly understood. To better understand such generalization failures, we believe the community should construct clean demonstrations under simplified conditions. To facilitate this, we propose a simple and flexible way to construct language models which fail to generalize in controllable ways when subsequently trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) on a given distribution of training tasks. Our construction uses Supervised Fine-Tuning on a dataset of a mixture of transcripts corresponding to a collection of 'conditional policies', which can each independently be assigned certain behaviors on each different task distribution, to obtain a model that is then well approximated as a 'mixture of conditional policies.' We observe that RL training then selects for policies that obtain the highest reward on the training distribution. This can produce striking behaviors: in a controlled setting with two distributions containing identical questions prepended with two different 'trigger strings', RL training on either distribution actively degrades performance on the other to zero, even though the underlying task is identical. We also use our construction to illustrate two novel ways in which generalization may fail in future language models, corresponding to distribution shifts of task coverage and temporal context respectively. While our construction is deliberately simple and may not closely resemble 'natural' generalization failures, the resulting 'model organisms' are of interest for alignment stress-testing and generalization science, and can be used as existence proofs that training success and generalization can come apart in structured ways.
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