设计有效的基于监控器的干预措施以缓解强化学习中的奖励黑客行为
Designing Effective Monitor-Based Interventions for Mitigating Reward Hacking During RL
Aria Wong, Joshua Engels, Neel Nanda
AI 速读 基于摘要
作者开源三个Qwen3-4B会发生奖励黑客的真实环境,研究如何有效使用监控器在RL训练中抑制奖励黑客,并总结出监控器设计与训练数据安排方面的经验。
cs.LG
查看原文摘要
Reinforcement learning (RL) rewards are notoriously difficult to design and control, often leading to the model learning unintended behaviors such as reward hacking. One potential solution is to monitor for reward hacking and penalize it when detected; however, training against a monitor could lead to evasive behavior, and our general understanding of how to apply monitors effectively during training is limited. To study how best to use monitors to mitigate reward hacking, we introduce and open source three realistic environments where Qwen3-4B reward hacks: a coding environment hackable via test overwriting, a medical chat environment hackable via sycophancy, and a biography generation environment hackable via hallucination. We first focus on the coding environment, where we find that: (1) models can learn to evade highly accurate monitors by exploiting systemic flaws in probes and LLM judges; (2) monitors that leak more learning signal during RL suppress reward hacking but are more often evaded; and (3) including easier problems in training can decrease reward hacking. We apply our findings to build better reward hacking monitors for the medical chat and biography generation environments that improve upon naive baselines to reduce reward hacking rates across seeds to before-training levels in some interventions. Our results demonstrate that our takeaways translate to new settings and that better monitor intervention designs are possible.