用博弈论自动调节模型微调强度,平衡性能与稳定性。
Post-Training at the Edge of Detectability: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Fine-Tuning

- 构建代理与监控者博弈模型,动态确定最优正则化系数。
- 在Qwen3-8B和Llama-3.2-1B上实现良好奖励保留率与性能提升。
- 适合需要持续学习或审计开源模型服务的场景。
强化学习微调广泛用于语言模型训练,以提升目标任务表现并限制对参考策略的偏离。标准方法采用KL正则化的强化学习目标,但未能提供正则化系数的合理设定依据。实践中常通过启发式或超参数搜索选择,导致训练成本增加或奖励保留不佳。本文提出一种博弈论框架,为该权衡提供明确的统计解释:在序列博弈中,代理最大化累积奖励,监控者持续观测策略输出并检测与参考策略的偏差。尽管出发点不同,我们证明均衡策略等价于一个带最优正则化参数的KL正则化强化学习问题,该参数可理解为单位可区分性下的最大奖励。基于凹凸分数规划经典结果,我们提出将该系数学习转化为标准微调流程的可执行方法,支持灵活集成。在Qwen3-8B和Llama-3.2-1B上的实验表明,该方法在持续学习设置下实现了有竞争力的奖励保留与性能平衡,并可用于审计提供开源模型服务的API提供商。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning is widely used in language model training to improve model performance on a target task while limiting drift from a reference policy. A standard way to balance this trade-off is via a KL-regularized RL objective, although this formulation does not by itself provide a principled way to set the regularization coefficient. In practice, the coefficient is typically chosen heuristically or via hyperparameter search, which can lead to unnecessary overhead in training cost or undesirable reward-retention trade-offs. We instead propose a game-theoretic framework that gives this trade-off an explicit statistical interpretation. Specifically, we study a sequential game in which an agent chooses a policy to maximize cumulative reward while a monitor observes policy outputs over time and tests for deviations from the reference policy. Although not originating from the same perspective, we show that the resulting equilibrium policy can nonetheless be expressed as the solution to a KL-regularized RL problem for an optimal regularization parameter that can be viewed as maximizing reward per unit of statistical distinguishability. Drawing on classical results from concave-convex fractional programming, we provide a principled method for learning this equilibrium coefficient via reduction to the KL-regularized RL objective, thus allowing for flexible integration into standard fine-tuning pipelines. In experiments with Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.2-1B, we demonstrate that our methods result in competitive reward-retention trade-offs in a continual learning setting, and illustrate how our framework may be used to audit API providers serving open-source models.
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