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

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adversarial training approach to reduce reward hacking in reinforcement learning for live AI-driven music accompaniment, enhancing diversity and responsiveness.

Contribution

It presents a novel adversarial method that co-evolves a discriminator with the policy to prevent collapse to trivial outputs in live music interaction.

Findings

Improved output diversity and harmonic coherence in generated music.

Enhanced adaptation speed and user agency in live interactions.

Quantitative and user study results confirm effectiveness.

Abstract

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.