验证地平线:编程智能体奖励无银弹
阅读原文· arxiv.org随着基础模型推理能力与工程框架增强,生成长代码方案已不困难,可靠验证反成瓶颈。验证器仅为人类意图的代理,意图天然欠指定,优化会拉大代理与意图差距(奖励破解或信号饱和)。论文沿可扩展性、忠实性、鲁棒性三维度刻画验证信号质量,研究测试验证器、评分标准验证器、用户验证器及自动化智能体验证器四种构造。实验表明针对性设计能抑制奖励破解、提升任务质量。核心结论:无固定奖励函数能随策略能力增长保持有效,验证必须与生成协同进化。
A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one. For today's coding agents, this intuition is being inverted: as foundation models develop stronger reasoning capabilities and engineering harnesses grow more sophisticated, generating complex candidate solutions is no longer difficult -- reliably verifying them has become the harder problem. Every verifier we can build is only a proxy for human intent, never the intent itself. This makes verification subject to a twofold difficulty: first, intent is underspecified by nature, making it inherently hard to faithfully check whether it has been fulfilled; second, during model training, optimization widens the gap between proxy and intent -- manifesting as reward hacking or signal saturation. To address this, we characterize the quality of verification signals along three dimensions -- scalability, faithfulness, and robustness -- and argue that achieving all three simultaneously is the central challenge. We further study four reward constructions: a test verifier for general coding tasks, a rubric verifier for frontend tasks, the user as verifier for real-world agent tasks, and an automated agent verifier for long-horizon tasks. Across different task types and policy capability levels, we conduct in-depth analysis and experiments on the core challenges of reward design and how to more effectively leverage reward signals. Experiments show that targeted verification design can effectively suppress reward hacking, improve task completion quality, and achieve significant gains across multiple internal and public benchmarks. These experiences collectively point to a core observation: no fixed reward function can remain effective as policy capability continues to grow; and verification must co-evolve with the generator.