Related papers: The Obfuscation Atlas: Mapping Where Honesty Emerg…

Large language models (LLMs) can be dishonest when reporting on their actions and beliefs -- for example, they may overstate their confidence in factual claims or cover up evidence of covert actions. Such dishonesty may arise due to the…

Language models trained with reinforcement learning (RL) can engage in reward hacking--the exploitation of unintended strategies for high reward--without revealing this behavior in their chain-of-thought reasoning. This makes the detection…

In this paper we present a Reinforcement Learning environment that leverages agent cooperation and communication, aimed at detection, learning and ultimately penalizing betrayal patterns that emerge in the behavior of self-interested…

Latent-space monitors aim to detect undesirable behaviours in Large Language Models by leveraging their internal representations rather than relying solely on black-box outputs. These methods have shown promise in identifying behaviours…

Mitigating reward hacking--where AI systems misbehave due to flaws or misspecifications in their learning objectives--remains a key challenge in constructing capable and aligned models. We show that we can monitor a frontier reasoning…

In this paper, we study the problem of deceptive reinforcement learning to preserve the privacy of a reward function. Reinforcement learning is the problem of finding a behaviour policy based on rewards received from exploratory behaviour.…

AI models might use deceptive strategies as part of scheming or misaligned behaviour. Monitoring outputs alone is insufficient, since the AI might produce seemingly benign outputs while their internal reasoning is misaligned. We thus…

Adversarial examples can be useful for identifying vulnerabilities in AI systems before they are deployed. In reinforcement learning (RL), adversarial policies can be developed by training an adversarial agent to minimize a target agent's…

Reward hacking, where a reasoning model exploits loopholes in a reward function to achieve high rewards without solving the intended task, poses a significant threat. This behavior may be explicit, i.e. verbalized in the model's…

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…

Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity's data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when…

Building reliable deception detectors for AI systems -- methods that could predict when an AI system is being strategically deceptive without necessarily requiring behavioural evidence -- would be valuable in mitigating risks from advanced…

Modern language models fail a fundamental requirement of trustworthy intelligence: knowing when not to answer. Despite achieving impressive accuracy on benchmarks, these models produce confident hallucinations, even when wrong answers carry…

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

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…

Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive…

Reinforcement learning for LLMs is vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit shortcuts to maximize reward without solving the intended task. We systematically study this phenomenon in coding tasks using an environment-manipulation…

Intent obfuscation is a common tactic in adversarial situations, enabling the attacker to both manipulate the target system and avoid culpability. Surprisingly, it has rarely been implemented in adversarial attacks on machine learning…

While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-oriented training induced exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when…