‹ 返回 2026-06-26

验证视野:编码助手奖励中没有“灵丹妙药”

The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards

▲ 30 💬 3 2026-06-26

Binghai Wang, Chenlong Zhang, Dayiheng Liu, Jiajun Zhang, Jiawei Chen, Mouxiang Chen, Rongyao Fang, Siyuan Zhang, Xuwu Wang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Zeyu Cui

摘要

一种常见的直觉认为,验证解决方案比生成解决方案更容易。但对于如今的编码智能体来说,这种直觉被打破了:随着基础模型具备更强的推理能力,以及技术手段越来越复杂,生成复杂的候选解决方案已不再困难——而可靠地验证这些解决方案则变成了更困难的任务。我们所能构建的每一个验证器都只是人类意图的代理,而非真正的意图本身。这就使得验证过程面临双重挑战:首先,人类的意图本身难以被精确描述,因此很难准确判断其是否得到实现;其次,在模型训练过程中,优化过程会扩大代理与真实意图之间的差距——表现为奖励操纵或信号饱和现象。为了应对这一问题,我们从三个维度来评估验证信号的质量:可扩展性、真实性以及鲁棒性。我们认为,同时实现这三个方面是核心挑战。我们还研究了四种不同的奖励机制:用于一般编码任务的测试型验证器、用于前端任务的评分型验证器、作为用户参与验证的现实场景中的智能体验证方式,以及用于长期任务的自动化智能体验证器。在不同任务类型和策略能力水平下,我们对奖励设计的核心挑战以及如何更有效地利用奖励信号进行了深入分析和实验。实验表明,有针对性的验证设计能够有效避免奖励操纵现象,提高任务完成质量,并在多个内部和公开基准测试中取得显著效果。这些经验共同揭示了一个重要结论:随着策略能力的持续提升,任何固定的奖励函数都无法保持有效;因此,验证机制必须与生成机制共同发展。

English Abstract

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.