论文库

On-device inference requires kernels that make effective use of local accelerators. Efficient training and evaluation of models that generate Apple Metal kernels benefit from native macOS tools and concurrent agent sessions. These sessions alternate between model requests, development commands, and GPU execution, leaving GPU capacity idle for much of a rollout. We present Metal Sandbox, infrastructure that combines restricted per-instance file access, native command execution, and command-level scheduling across interconnected Macs. Each agent retains its workspace and private development environment. Parallel commands can run concurrently, while serial commands share one execution slot per node; eligible waiting commands can migrate to available Macs and return results to the original agent. Integration with Harbor supports task execution, automatic verification, and rollout collection through a common workflow. Controlled experiments on four Mac mini M4 nodes achieve $1.68\times$--$2.05\times$ gains in command throughput under concentrated demand. Sixteen static agent traces give an estimated $2.14\times$ sustained-throughput gain for four sessions per node versus one, assuming continuously replenished sessions and unchanged mean durations. Replaying these measured traces under dynamic scheduling reduces mean tool waiting by 18.8% and batch elapsed time by 22.3%, assuming unchanged phase durations. Metal Sandbox and its Harbor integration are open-source on GitHub.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models with human preferences, but it remains vulnerable to \emph{reward hacking}, whereby a policy exploits flaws in the reward function at the expense of the intended behavior. Reward shaping can stabilize training and partially mitigate reward hacking, yet its design principles remain underexplored. Our systematic study of common shaping methods suggests that shaped rewards should be bounded and should rise rapidly before gradually saturating. We introduce \emph{Preference as Reward} (PAR), which applies a sigmoid to centered rewards to produce a signal that reflects the reward model's latent preferences. We show that PAR has a variance-reduction property that stabilizes training and substantially widens the window for effective early stopping. Using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Gemma2-2B, PAR consistently outperforms the other shaping methods evaluated and demonstrates high data efficiency and robustness. Comparisons with unshaped rewards across four base models and four reinforcement learning algorithms show that PAR is effective across models and particularly beneficial for actor--critic methods when value estimates become unstable. The code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.