Generative Adversarial Post-Training Mitigates Reward Hacking in Live Human-AI Music Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wu, Yusong, Brade, Stephen, Ma, Aleksandra Teng, Fowler, Tia-Jane, Yang, Enning, Banar, Berker, Courville, Aaron, Jaques, Natasha, Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wu, Yusong
Brade, Stephen
Ma, Aleksandra Teng
Fowler, Tia-Jane
Yang, Enning
Banar, Berker
Courville, Aaron
Jaques, Natasha
Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna
author_facet Wu, Yusong
Brade, Stephen
Ma, Aleksandra Teng
Fowler, Tia-Jane
Yang, Enning
Banar, Berker
Courville, Aaron
Jaques, Natasha
Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna
contents Most applications of generative AI involve a sequential interaction in which a person inputs a prompt and waits for a response, and where reaction time and adaptivity are not important factors. In contrast, live jamming is a collaborative interaction that requires real-time coordination and adaptation without access to the other player's future moves, while preserving diversity to sustain a creative flow. Reinforcement learning post-training enables effective adaptation through on-policy interaction, yet it often reduces output diversity by exploiting coherence-based rewards. This collapse, known as ``reward hacking'', affects many RL post-training pipelines, but is especially harmful in live jamming, where musical creativity relies on dynamic variation and mutual responsiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial training method on policy-generated trajectories to mitigate reward hacking in RL post-training for melody-to-chord accompaniment. A co-evolving discriminator separates policy trajectories from the data distribution, while the policy maximizes the discriminator output in addition to coherence rewards to prevent collapse to trivial outputs. We evaluate accompaniment quality and output diversity in simulation with both fixed test melodies and learned melody agents, and we conduct a user study with the model deployed in a real-time interactive system with expert musicians. Quantitative evaluation and user feedback demonstrate improved output diversity, harmonic coherence, adaptation speed and user agency. Our results demonstrate a simple yet effective method to mitigate reward hacking in RL post-training of generative sequence models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17879
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generative Adversarial Post-Training Mitigates Reward Hacking in Live Human-AI Music Interaction
Wu, Yusong
Brade, Stephen
Ma, Aleksandra Teng
Fowler, Tia-Jane
Yang, Enning
Banar, Berker
Courville, Aaron
Jaques, Natasha
Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna
Machine Learning
Sound
Most applications of generative AI involve a sequential interaction in which a person inputs a prompt and waits for a response, and where reaction time and adaptivity are not important factors. In contrast, live jamming is a collaborative interaction that requires real-time coordination and adaptation without access to the other player's future moves, while preserving diversity to sustain a creative flow. Reinforcement learning post-training enables effective adaptation through on-policy interaction, yet it often reduces output diversity by exploiting coherence-based rewards. This collapse, known as ``reward hacking'', affects many RL post-training pipelines, but is especially harmful in live jamming, where musical creativity relies on dynamic variation and mutual responsiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial training method on policy-generated trajectories to mitigate reward hacking in RL post-training for melody-to-chord accompaniment. A co-evolving discriminator separates policy trajectories from the data distribution, while the policy maximizes the discriminator output in addition to coherence rewards to prevent collapse to trivial outputs. We evaluate accompaniment quality and output diversity in simulation with both fixed test melodies and learned melody agents, and we conduct a user study with the model deployed in a real-time interactive system with expert musicians. Quantitative evaluation and user feedback demonstrate improved output diversity, harmonic coherence, adaptation speed and user agency. Our results demonstrate a simple yet effective method to mitigate reward hacking in RL post-training of generative sequence models.
title Generative Adversarial Post-Training Mitigates Reward Hacking in Live Human-AI Music Interaction
topic Machine Learning
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17879