单个语言模型模拟器会崩溃,导致策略泛化失败。
One Frozen Simulator Is Not Enough: Simulator Collapse in Multi-Agent RL

- 用多个可训练模拟器协同训练,避免策略过拟合单一模拟器。
- 在三个基准上提升成功率最高达14%,人类测试也表现更好。
- 适合研究人机交互、多智能体强化学习的学者和工程师。
人类-智能体交互中的多智能体强化学习通常依赖单个大型语言模型模拟用户行为。我们发现该方法系统性地无法泛化,并将其归因于模拟器坍缩:由于模拟器大模型存在模式坍缩,基于其训练的策略会过度适应主导模式,从而在未见模拟器和真实用户上表现不佳。我们从理论上形式化了这一坍缩现象,并提出两种互补解决方案:推理时的语义采样(Verbalized Sampling),通过从语义响应分布中采样拓宽模拟器行为;训练时的协同训练(Co-Training),联合优化策略与一组可训练模拟器,防止其过拟合于任一模拟器的模式。我们在三个多轮对话基准(Persuasion for Good、τ²-bench、CooperBench)上验证了两种方法,语义采样使保留测试集成功率提升最高9%,协同训练进一步提升至14%;真人实验也显示类似增益。两种方法均保持了策略多样性。为支持后续研究,我们开源了SCOPE框架,用于群体协同训练的多智能体强化学习。更广泛地,我们的结果表明,训练环境的多样性,而非仅策略本身,对多轮强化学习向现实部署的泛化至关重要。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Multi-agent reinforcement learning for human-AI interaction typically relies on a single large language model to simulate user behavior. We show that this approach systematically fails to generalize, and trace the failure to simulator collapse: because the simulator LLM is mode-collapsed, an LLM policy trained against it overfits to narrow strategies that exploit the simulator's dominant mode, and such a policy transfers poorly to unseen simulators and real users. We formalize this collapse theoretically and propose two complementary solutions, one at inference time and one at training time. The inference-time solution, Verbalized Sampling, broadens the simulator's behavior by sampling from a verbalized response distribution, reducing mode collapse. The training-time solution, Co-Training, jointly optimizes the policy against a population of trainable simulators, preventing it from overfitting to any single simulator's mode. We validate both solutions on three multi-turn benchmarks: Persuasion for Good, $τ^2$-bench, and CooperBench. Verbalized Sampling improves held-out success by up to 9% over single-simulator RL, and Co-Training pushes gains further to 14%; the human study shows similar gain on real users. Both solutions preserve the policy diversity that collapses under single-simulator RL. To support further work in this direction, we release SCOPE, an open-source framework for Population Co-Training multi-agent RL. More broadly, our results suggest that the diversity of the training environment, not only the policy, is critical to the generalization of multi-turn RL to real-world deployment.
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