arXiv:2609.39533v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: During reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), large language models (LLMs) can exploit loopholes in their environments to obtain high r...
By Shouli Wang, Yanfeng Jia, Zhihao Ou, Zitao Su, Ruize He, Haotong Xie, Hao Peng, Juanzi Li, Xiaozhi Wang
arXiv:2602. 12124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk arises from capability-seeking RL training in vulnerable environments.
By Yujun Zhou, Yue Huang, Han Bao, Kehan Guo, Zhenwen Liang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tian Gao, Werner Geyer, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang
Language-model agents act through repeated cycles of observation, reasoning, and action selection, making safety monitoring depend on both internal model state and environment context. We study reward-hacking monitors in ReAct-style agents acting in Gameable ALFWorld and WebShop.
arXiv:2606. 06223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model agents act through repeated cycles of observation, reasoning, and action selection, making safety monitoring depend on both internal model state and environment context.
By Patrick Wilhelm, Odej Kao
arXiv:2606. 04075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards.
By Wei Liu, Xinyi Mou, Hanqi Yan, Zhongyu Wei, Yulan He
arXiv:2606. 04923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) uses an LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) to score model outputs according to rubrics as rewards.
By Xuekang Wang, Zhuoyuan Hao, Shuo Hou, Hao Peng, Juanzi Li, Xiaozhi Wang
BenchShield is a formal, model-backed instrumentation layer designed to protect reward integrity in large language model (LLM) agent benchmarks. It uses a finite lifecycle model of reward-relevant events to run a static, phase-aware taint analysis that flags potential reward-hacking paths before execution, and a runtime analysis that attributes concrete agent actions and provides evidence-backed claims. The system was evaluated on a corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories from over 31,000 public agent runs across three benchmarks, showing significant improvements in recall, coverage, and cost efficiency compared to a baseline hackability scanner.
By Shenghan Zheng, Zonglin Di, Yimin Liu, Kyoung Whan Choe, Jiankai Sun, Heguang Lin, Penghao Jiang, Yifeng He, Xiao Cheng, Jicheng Wang, Wenbo Chen, Alex Yates, Yinzhe Zhao, Bingran You, Yuan Gao, Ayush Munot, Shubham Gaur, Zhe Ye, Hao Wang, Xiangyi Li, Dawn Song, Christophe Hauser
arXiv:2606. 26300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one.
By Binghai Wang, Chenlong Zhang, Dayiheng Liu, Jiajun Zhang, Jiawei Chen, Mouxiang Chen, Rongyao Fang, Siyuan Zhang, Xuwu Wang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Zeyu Cui
arXiv:2609.36308v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In rece...
By Long Phan, Stephen K. Yang, Jason J. Lim, Mantas Mazeika, Wenyu Zhang, Zheyuan Liu, Richard Ren, Jingxiang Meng, Yaoteng Tan, Weiliang Zhao, Addison Wu, Matei Anghel, Dan Hendrycks
RePolicy is a reinforcement learning approach designed to invoke safety policies for language model agents by evaluating entire execution trajectories within context-dependent policy libraries. It generates policy-grounded rationales and safety judgments, and is initialized with the PolicyTraj-20K dataset before fine-tuning via GRPO with verifiable rewards and policy-context perturbation. Experiments on six safety benchmarks demonstrate strong safety-detection performance and robust policy invocation across varying contexts.
By Houcheng Jiang, Boxuan Zhang, Qiyong Zhong, Junfeng Fang, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
arXiv:2608.30724v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used to run autonomous ML experiments, iterating on target metrics with little human oversight. Prior work has documented...
By Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, Meiri Anto, Leon Eshuijs, Julian Moncarz, Kaustubh Kislay, Juan J. Vazquez
arXiv:2606. 28955v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning agents can exploit misspecified reward signals to achieve high apparent returns while failing on the intended objective, a failure mode known as reward hacking.
By Evgenii Opryshko, Umangi Jain, Igor Gilitschenski