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Related papers: Detecting and Suppressing Reward Hacking with Grad…

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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are two key steps in the post-training of modern Language Models (LMs). A common problem is reward hacking, where the policy may exploit inaccuracies of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Johannes Ackermann , Michael Noukhovitch , Takashi Ishida , Masashi Sugiyama

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinpeng Wang , Nitish Joshi , Barbara Plank , Rico Angell , He He

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Miles Turpin , Andy Arditi , Marvin Li , Joe Benton , Julian Michael

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Mirza Farhan Bin Tarek , Rahmatollah Beheshti

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for improving the complex reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, current RLVR methods face two significant challenges: the near-miss reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Kaiyi Zhang , Ang Lv , Jinpeng Li , Yongbo Wang , Feng Wang , Haoyuan Hu , Rui Yan

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Deepanshu Goyal , Yihan Zhang , Winnie Chow , Rui Pan , Shizhe Diao , Jipeng Zhang , Kashun Shum , Tong Zhang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Tianyang Han , Hengyu Shi , Junjie Hu , Xu Yang , Zhiling Wang , Junhao Su

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models (LLMs) can be formalized as a latent variable problem, where the model needs to generate intermediate reasoning steps. While prior approaches such as iterative reward-ranked…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Jiarui Yao , Yifan Hao , Hanning Zhang , Hanze Dong , Wei Xiong , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Pretrained language models are commonly aligned with human preferences and downstream tasks via reinforcement finetuning (RFT), which refers to maximizing a (possibly learned) reward function using policy gradient algorithms. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Noam Razin , Hattie Zhou , Omid Saremi , Vimal Thilak , Arwen Bradley , Preetum Nakkiran , Joshua Susskind , Etai Littwin

As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks,…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Rui Wu , Ruixiang Tang

DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Chenxing Wei , Jiarui Yu , Ying Tiffany He , Hande Dong , Yao Shu , Fei Yu

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Bowen Baker , Joost Huizinga , Leo Gao , Zehao Dou , Melody Y. Guan , Aleksander Madry , Wojciech Zaremba , Jakub Pachocki , David Farhi

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has enabled strong post-training gains in domains such as math and coding, though many open-ended settings rely on rubric-based rewards. We study reward hacking in rubric-based RL, where a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anas Mahmoud , MohammadHossein Rezaei , Zihao Wang , Anisha Gunjal , Bing Liu , Yunzhong He

Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning large language models with human preferences. While recent research has focused on algorithmic improvements, the importance of prompt-data construction has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Wei Shen , Guanlin Liu , Zheng Wu , Ruofei Zhu , Qingping Yang , Chao Xin , Yu Yue , Lin Yan

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by improving their ability to refuse responses to questions beyond their knowledge, thereby reducing hallucinations and improving reliability. Effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Runchuan Zhu , Zinco Jiang , Jiang Wu , Zhipeng Ma , Jiahe Song , Fengshuo Bai , Dahua Lin , Lijun Wu , Conghui He

Sequential labeling is a fundamental NLP task, forming the backbone of many applications. Supervised learning of Seq2Seq models has shown great success on these problems. However, the training objectives are still significantly disconnected…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-22 Kazuma Hashimoto , Karthik Raman

Reward hacking is a form of misalignment in which models overoptimize proxy rewards without genuinely solving the underlying task. Precisely measuring reward hacking occurrence remains challenging because true task rewards are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Muhammad Khalifa , Zohaib Khan , Omer Tafveez , Hao Peng , Lu Wang

Retrieval-augmented large language models, when optimized with outcome-level rewards, can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions. However, under noisy retrieval, models frequently suffer from "right-answer-wrong-reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yu Liu , Wenxiao Zhang , Diandian Guo , Cong Cao , Fangfang Yuan , Qiang Sun , Yanbing Liu , Jin B. Hong , Zhiyuan Ma
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