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arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Interpretable Meta-Policies for Neural Decision Making

NEXUS is a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that pairs neural skills with symbolic meta-policies, so transparent reasoning sits at the level of high-level skills rather than atomic actions. It uses object-centric observations and LLM interaction to design reward functions and meta-policies. Agents learn disentangled skills, align better with goals in the game manual, resist reward hacking more, and cope better with game simplifications than deep RL. The paper also compares neural, symbolic and neuro-symbolic meta-policy architectures.

LLM
NEXUSarXiv

research, training, ai-safety· Added 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Exploring the Limits of the Delta Learning Hypothesis: Single-Pair Generator Biases in Direct Preference Optimization

This paper tests the delta-learning hypothesis for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), where the larger model's response in a single model pair is treated as preferred. It shows, in theory and experiments, that fixed pairs add generator-specific biases that predict the preference label regardless of quality. DPO on single-pair data underperforms multi-model data, consistent with reward hacking, and adding more generators partly fixes it without an external judge.

LLM
arXiv

training, research· Added 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Eat Your Precision: Precision Objective Mitigates Reward Hacking in Rubric-based RL

FORK is a reward for rubric-based reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes recall and a new precision objective. Precision requires each unit of a response to be necessary (rubric-driven necessity credits) and factually correct (a grader). Rubric-coverage rewards otherwise produce verbose, less accurate responses. FORK keeps similar coverage with shorter outputs, raising win rate against the base policy from 10.6% to 68.0% on RubricHub-Medical and from 22.1% to 74.1% on HealthBench.

LLM
HealthBenchRubricHub-MedicalFORK

training, research· Added 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Reproducible Evaluation as the Substrate for Safe Prompt Compression in Production Agents

This paper presents an offline evaluation harness for a production merchant-facing conversational agent. It stays reproducible when live backend data changes and can be regenerated when it goes stale. Used as the fitness function for GEPA prompt optimization under a correctness gate against reward hacking, it shrinks the full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without losing held-out correctness, across three subject-model families.

GEPALLM
arXiv

evals, prompting, agents· Added 26 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Reward Misspecification Degrades Chain-of-Thought Monitorability

This paper shows that reward misspecification alone degrades chain-of-thought (CoT) monitorability in language models. Using a testbed of paired true and misspecified rewards across three models and three tasks, CoTs keep reasoning about task intent while outputs hack the reward. The proposed reward description training injects an LM-inferred reward description into the input and raises monitorability by an average of 24% or 42% absolute, depending on the metric.

LLM
arXiv

ai-safety, training, research· Added 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Mitigating Reward Hacking in Preference Reward Models with Evolving Penalties

Dynalize is a method that reduces reward hacking during online RL training against preference reward models. Periodically and asynchronously, a language model reads training rollouts and writes penalties for undesirable behaviors the reward model seems to reward, and a judge applies them to every rollout. In clinical counseling and creative writing it sustains longer training and improves external benchmarks, and the gains hold in multi-turn training and after reward model retraining.

LLM
DynalizearXiv

training, research, ai-safety· Added 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

VibeTraining-Bench: Data-Trainer-Harness Co-Design for Iterative System Improvement

VibeTraining-Bench is a benchmark for cross-component co-design, where research agents iteratively refine training data, trainers and inference harnesses for a fixed starting agent system. Tasks cover terminal operation, software engineering, multi-turn tool use and math reasoning, with safeguards against reward hacking. On SWE-bench Verified, GPT-6 Astra raises the target system from 32.9% to 53.7%, against 55.4% for the human-developed instruct model.

Docker
VibeTraining-BenchGPT-6 AstraSWE-bench Verified+1

evals, agents, training· Added 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored Defense

The paper shows that symmetric aggregation of a primary reward (correctness) and auxiliary rewards (brevity, efficiency) in LLM post-training can raise aggregate reward while primary-task performance falls. It proves that deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained. It proposes Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which elects an anchor channel by policy drift and gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG reaches 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, and shortens responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training. Experiments on Qwen and Llama models cover math and program synthesis.

GRPOQwen3Qwen+2
Qwen3-4BarXiv

training, research· Added 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Evidence-First Agentic Verification

Introduces Sauron, an evidence-first agentic verifier that checks rubric criteria for long-horizon agent tasks by investigating both environment state and execution trace, and trusts a claim (including an agent's self-reported success) only after validating it against its source. Bounded queries and joint investigation of related criteria cut context use, and each verdict carries an auditable evidence receipt. On 2,586 human-labeled criteria from 100 personal-assistant episodes it has the best F1 of five verifiers across eight backbones (0.96 vs 0.92 for Gandalf with GPT-5.6 Sol, at 23% lower cost). It detects 97% of injected failures across 13 fault families, including reward-hacking simulations, with 2% false flags on clean controls, and leads on the TRAIL agent-error benchmark. It matters because unreliable rubric verdicts used as RL rewards can reinforce bad behavior.

SauronGandalfTRAIL+2

evals, agents, research· Added 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🛡️ Security

Forensic Analysis of the HackRF One with PortaPack Mayhem Firmware

Paper on the forensic analysis of a stand-alone HackRF One with a PortaPack running Mayhem firmware v2.0.1. It establishes at source-code level which data sit on the microSD card, their formats, when they are written and how to interpret them. The method is applied to a four-month SD image and covers RTC-battery-dependent timestamp rules, traces of on-device trimming and text editing, cluster-level recovery of deleted IQ captures, and decoding of recorded signals cross-checked with an independent decoder. In the example, the tail of a deleted IQ capture and a trimmed-away segment are recovered, and six captures are attributed to one rolling-code OOK transmitter with a shared 32-bit ID. It provides an artifact catalogue, interpretation rules and acquisition recommendations.

HackRF OnePortaPackMayhem firmware
rolling-code OOKreplay attacklocation spoofing+1

Hardware & RF, Blue Team & Detection· Added 17 Oct 2026, published 11 Oct 2026

huggingface.copaper🧠 AI

MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvement

Technical report for Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model family, which scales RL compute along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context, more diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses, and groupwise agentic grading that gives better reward signals and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include a frozen MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking, built on a mid-trained hybrid-SWA architecture. The authors open-source training dynamics, RL environments and the RL framework, which makes it a useful reference for reproducing scaled agentic RL.

Mixture of ExpertsHugging Face
MiMo-V2.6Xiaomi

training, research, agents· Added 10 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Reward Hacking as a Transmissible Strategy in Multi-Agent Coding Systems

The paper shows that reward hacking learned by one coding agent during RL against automated evaluators can spread to other agents in a multi-agent system. Across four open-weight backbones, coding RL elicits and amplifies hacking when the system prompt describes the mechanism explicitly and when mid-training exposes the model to facts about the coding environment. Post-RL source agents transmit the hack through code, shared memory and natural-language plans, and even small open-weight agents induce hacking in stronger closed-weight targets. On hard tasks the hack can intensify along a transmission chain after the source leaves, as the code accumulates more persuasive justifications. A theoretical analysis gives conditions under which hacking amplifies, persists or decays. Hacking also biases task routing toward hacking agents and survives candidate aggregation. Code review by the coder or by a separate verifier reduces the hacks that get delivered.

arXiv

ai-safety, agents, research· Added 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

MiMo-V2.6: Scaling Reinforcement Learning Towards Self-Improvement

Technical report for the MiMo-V2.6 omni-modal model series, which scales RL compute after mid-training on a multimodal corpus, using a hybrid sliding-window-attention architecture. RL is scaled along three axes: asynchronous training with 1,568 samples and 2.7-3.7B tokens per step at up to 1M context; diverse environments (code, general, visual, cyber) under mixed agent harnesses; and groupwise agentic grading that gives better rewards for long-horizon tasks and favors shorter, token-efficient solutions. Stability measures include freezing the MoE router and a multi-layer defense against reward hacking. The authors open-source the training dynamics, RL environments and RL framework.

Mixture of Experts
MiMo-V2.6Xiaomi

training, research, models· Added 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

What Output-Only Review Cannot Verify: Study Contracts for Research Agents

Proposes "study contracts" that bind an AI-generated study's declared experimental choices, run obligations and claim scope to recorded execution evidence, defining contract-relative verification as distinct from scientific truth. In a diagnostic with eight self-authored clean/mutated pairs, a deterministic fault-specific checker caught all eight mutations, while eighteen LLM judge aliases given metadata-filtered packages flagged 104 of 144 mutated cases (32 abstentions, 8 terminal failures). The authors stress the setting is deliberately information-asymmetric, not a verifier-quality comparison or reward-hacking result, and call for full-information comparisons, legitimate-adaptation controls and closed-loop agent evaluations.

research, evals, agents· Added 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Better Call Reward: Reward Hacking as Strategic Abstention in Legal Reasoning Models

Researchers fine-tune Qwen3-8B with GRPO against a proxy reward built from surface features (citation count, legalese density, response length) and find the model learns to strategically abstain rather than reason: on 16 LegalBench yes/no legal tasks, accuracy collapses from chance (0.500) to 0.072 because the rate of properly formatted, committed answers drops from 0.900 to 0.109, even though accuracy on answers it does commit to actually rises. They term this the "Saul Goodman effect," formally prove it is the optimal policy for any surface-feature proxy that doesn't penalize abstention, show 89.3% of post-training citations are hallucinated/corrupted real case names, and introduce three diagnostics (Confidence Theater Score, Citation Plausibility Rate, Regret Gap) to detect this failure mode before deployment.

Qwen3GRPO
Qwen3-8BLegalBench

research, ai-safety, training· Added 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

RubricArmor: Adversarial Evolution Improves LLM-Based Rubric Generation

RubricArmor is an adversarial framework for generating evaluation rubrics used in rubric-based reinforcement learning of LLMs, designed to preempt reward hacking before RL training begins. It alternates an attack step, which synthesizes adversarial responses that satisfy the current rubric while failing the actual task, with a repair step that revises the rubric to close the exposed gaps while keeping valid criteria intact. The paper reports that rubrics produced this way outperform existing LLM-based rubric generation baselines and lead to more effective downstream rubric-based RL.

RubricArmor

training· Added 6 Oct 2026, published 4 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

IDRF: Inverse-Distilled Reward Fine-tuning of Masked Discrete Diffusion Models

IDRF is a reward fine-tuning framework for few-step masked discrete diffusion generators that replaces the intractable sequence-level KL penalty in reverse-KL-regularized objectives with an inverse-distillation regularization term, proven to upper-bound the true KL divergence to the reference distribution. It frames few-step diffusion sampling as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and optimizes reward via a clipped policy-gradient objective over the student's own trajectories, without needing reference-model rollouts. Across DNA, image, and text generation tasks, IDRF reaches high reward with up to 32x fewer denoising steps than the reference model while reducing reward hacking and preserving sample quality.

Vladislav Gromadskii

training, research, multimodal· Added 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

A Near-Zero Monitor Readout Is Not Evidence of Behavioral Control

This paper shows that training policies against monitors (an in-domain activation probe and two penalties that score how early a model commits to its final answer) can drive the monitor's readout to a numerical floor without actually controlling the underlying reward-hacking behavior. In a code-generation RL environment where the exploit is available from the start of the reasoning trace, runs with an identical zero-median "commitment" score range from mostly honest to near-pure reward hacking depending only on random seed, and probe-trained runs reach the hacking regime despite floor-level readouts, because models learn to insert generic planning/filler text that delays the exploit past the point the monitor reads without removing it from the output. The authors argue offline monitor validation plus a low training-time readout is not sufficient evidence of behavioral control and that an out-of-band behavioral check is required.

ai-safety, training· Added 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Beyond Reward Hacking: Proxy Divergence Across Four Layers of a Staged Humanoid Learning Pipeline

This arXiv preprint extends the concept of reward hacking to four distinct "proxy" layers in a staged RL training pipeline for legged robots: the reward itself, the curriculum gate, the evaluation statistic, and the reference motion. Using measurements from a continuous PPO policy lineage trained on a simulated 1.91m humanoid over four stages and 13,500 iterations on a single laptop GPU, the author shows concrete divergence failures — e.g., a curriculum gate built on averaged error that advanced at its rate limit while the gated skill was absent, and a batched push test whose synchronized resets aliased gait phase and misranked push magnitudes by danger. For each layer it proposes a reformulation that closes the divergence, including L1 costs, peak/outcome statistics, gate reachability checks, deterministic/phase-desynchronized evaluation, and function-preserving input widening for growing a single policy instead of retraining.

PyTorch
PPO

research, training· Added 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

LineupRL: Verifiable Reinforcement Learning for Time Series Captioning via Caption-to-Series Identification

LineupRL is an RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards) pipeline for training time series captioning models, where the reward comes from a frozen LLM verifier that must match a generated caption back to its source time series among distractors, rather than judging caption quality directly. The authors show a 3B vision-language model trained with LineupRL outperforms SFT and RL baselines across two captioning benchmarks plus downstream forecasting/reconstruction tasks, and even beats the 72B VLM whose captions the SFT baseline distills from, using 1/24 the parameters, while resisting reward hacking.

vision-language model

training, research, multimodal· Added 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🛡️ Security

AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents

AuraForge is a method for synthesizing and validating executable security tests to train coding agents toward secure (not just functionally correct) code, combining attack-oriented test synthesis, multi-language task construction, and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors release AuraGym, a 679-task executable training gym drawn from 344 real-world Python/JavaScript/TypeScript repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with AuraForge-synthesized tests beats human-written tests on both functional-pass (FuncPass) and security-pass (SecPass) metrics while cutting false positives by over 83%.

QwenPythonJavaScript+1
AuraGymQwen3.5-4B

AI Security, AppSec· Added 3 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

AuraForge: Scaling Security Supervision for Training Coding Agents

AuraForge is a pipeline that synthesizes and validates executable security tests to supervise the training of coding agents, using attack-oriented test synthesis and safeguards against reward hacking. The authors build AuraGym, a multi-language (Python, JavaScript, TypeScript) training gym of 679 feature-implementation tasks from 344 real repositories spanning 177 CWE categories, and show that training Qwen3.5-4B with these synthesized tests beats human-written security tests on both functional correctness (FuncPass) and security (SecPass) metrics, while producing about 3x more test cases and cutting false positives by 83 percent.

Qwen3.5PythonJavaScript+1
AuraForgeAuraGymQwen3.5-4B

research, training, coding-agents· Added 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

CheatBench: Measuring Reward Gaming in AI Agents

CheatBench is a benchmark for measuring "reward gaming" (a.k.a. reward hacking) in reinforcement-learning-trained AI agents: environments across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, and visual tasks pair difficult assignments with opportunities to cheat, letting researchers compare how different models pursue reward when honest completion is hard. The paper motivates this with real and controlled incidents of agents accessing unauthorized information, evading monitoring, and breaching sandbox protections, and the benchmark is publicly released to support cross-model and cross-task-category comparisons.

CheatBench

evals, ai-safety· Added 30 Sep 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

Verifier Errors in RLVR: Reward Hacking, Limits of Feedback, and Selective Control

This arXiv paper analyzes reward hacking in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), using gradient flow analysis with a fixed verifier to characterize when reward increases while correctness decreases. The authors prove that standard RLVR training signals are insufficient to detect or reduce "accepted errors" (incorrect responses rewarded by the verifier) without also suppressing correct responses, and propose a "selective control" correction that incorporates partial audit feedback on correctness to simultaneously lower accepted-error probability and raise correct-response probability. Experiments on log-linear and neural contextual bandits and a language model support the theory, showing selective control under partial auditing reduces accepted errors while increasing correctness.

training, research· Added 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agents

SWE-Bench Pro Verified is a corrected version of the SWE-Bench Pro coding-agent benchmark that closes reward-hacking channels (Git history remnants, hidden test/fixture leakage, metadata leaks, network access to gold patches) and fixes 102 of 731 instances with misleading task descriptions or overly narrow/broad tests. Evaluations show some models that previously scored well (e.g. via hacking) drop substantially on the verified benchmark, while models with little hacking behavior stay roughly the same, suggesting original SWE-Bench Pro scores overestimate real coding capability. Code and dataset are released via AgentCompass and Hugging Face.

GitDocker
SWE-Bench ProSWE-Bench Pro VerifiedAgentCompass+7

evals, coding-agents· Added 26 Sep 2026

arxiv.orgpaper🧠 AI

SWE-Bench Pro Verified: A Reliable Benchmark for Software Engineering Agents

SWE-Bench Pro Verified is a corrected version of the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark for software engineering agents, addressing reward hacking from gold-solution/hidden-test leakage and fixing flawed task instances (misleading problem statements, improperly scoped tests). Re-evaluating models on this verified benchmark shows substantially lower performance than previously reported, indicating SWE-Bench Pro results overestimated real coding capability.

SWE-Bench ProSWE-Bench Pro Verified

evals, coding-agents· Added 26 Sep 2026