Related papers: Incentives and Outcomes in Bug Bounties

Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…

In the context of rapid discoveries by leaders in AI, governments must consider how to design regulation that matches the increasing pace of new AI capabilities. Regulatory Markets for AI is a proposal designed with adaptability in mind. It…

We study the causal effects of financial incentives on the quality of crowdwork. We focus on performance-based payments (PBPs), bonus payments awarded to workers for producing high quality work. We design and run randomized behavioral…

A widespread belief in the blockchain security community is that automated techniques are only good for detecting shallow bugs, typically of small value. In this paper, we present the techniques and insights that have led us to repeatable…

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently shown that large language models (LLMs) can develop their own reasoning without direct supervision. However, applications in the medical domain, specifically for question…

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

We analyze the first and second moment risk premia in the Bitcoin market based on options and realized returns and contrast them to the premia embedded in the main US stock index market. First, Bitcoin is much more volatile and has a higher…

This paper presents a framework that selectively triggers security reviews for incoming source code changes. Functioning as a review bot within a code review service, the framework can automatically request additional security reviews at…

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly power everyday AI applications such as chatbots, computer-use assistants, and autonomous robots, where performance often depends on manually well-crafted prompts. LLM-based prompt optimizers…

Security often receives insufficient developer attention because it does not directly generate visible value, leading to underinvestment in practice. We evaluate a countermeasure by team-level incentives tied to measurable security…

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Eclipse, an open source software project, acknowledges its donors by presenting donation badges in its issue tracking system Bugzilla. However, the rewarding effect of this strategy is currently unknown. We applied a framework of causal…

Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities continue to grow in number and complexity, presenting an increasing challenge for organizations worldwide. Organizations use threat modelling and bug bounty programs to address these threats, which…

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Recent work on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown that large language models (LLMs) can be substantially improved using outcome-level verification signals, such as unit tests for code or exact-match checks for…

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…