让Transformer模型学会看奖励反馈,提升动态决策能力。
Breaking Feedback-Blindness: Utility-Augmented Transformer for Sequential Decision Making

- 用奖励信息动态调节注意力,打破仅靠观察选策略的局限
- 在4个动态任务中均超越现有方法,噪声环境下提升更明显
- 适合需要快速适应变化的强化学习与推荐系统场景
非平稳、部分可观测环境中的序列决策需快速响应隐含状态变化。现有Transformer决策模型存在结构瓶颈:即使奖励用于训练或作为输入,注意力检索仍主要依赖观测相似性。我们将其定义为反馈盲检索,并证明在反馈相关任务中,具有相同观测但不同动作-奖励结果的历史无法被仅基于观测的注意力区分,导致次优选择。为此,我们提出实用增强型Transformer(UAT),一种受反馈条件控制的检索注意力架构,通过紧凑的效用状态调节查询、键和值投影,使动作-奖励历史在前向传播中直接影响上下文检索。UAT还具备零门控退化特性,当反馈无信息时可还原为原始Transformer。在有限时域紧致性和Lipschitz假设下,我们证明UAT严格扩展了仅基于观测的Transformer类,并能一致逼近依赖反馈的决策映射。在四个非平稳基准任务中——包含隐藏目标转移的合成导航、非平稳脓毒症治疗、跨市场投资组合分配及延迟反馈推荐——UAT持续优于仅基于观测、测试时自适应及输入级反馈基线,在噪声更强需强适应的场景中增益尤为显著。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Sequential decision making in non-stationary and partially observable environments requires rapid adaptation to latent regime changes. However, existing Transformer decision models face a structural bottleneck in the retrieval mechanism: even when reward is used for training or exposed as an input token, attention retrieval remains primarily driven by observation-derived similarity. We formalize this limitation as feedback-blind retrieval, and formally show that, on feedback-informative tasks, observation-equivalent histories with different action-reward outcomes cannot be distinguished by any observation-only attention, resulting in suboptimal choice. To address this mismatch, we propose the Utility-Augmented Transformer (UAT), a new feedback-conditioned retrieval attention architecture in which a compact utility state modulates the query, key, and value projections, allowing action-reward history to directly alter context retrieval during the forward pass. UAT also enjoys an exact zero-gate degradation property that recovers the Vanilla Transformer when feedback is uninformative. Under finite-horizon compactness and Lipschitz assumptions, we prove that UAT strictly enlarges the observation-only Transformer class and can uniformly approximate feedback-dependent decision maps. Across four non-stationary benchmarks: synthetic navigation with hidden goal shifts, non-stationary sepsis treatment, cross-market portfolio allocation, and delayed-feedback recommendation, UAT consistently improves performance over observation-only, test-time adaptation, and input-level feedback baselines, with particularly large gains in noisier regimes that require stronger adaptation.
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。