Hacking or Just Failing? A More Capable LLM Monitor Better Separates Reward Hacking from Honest Failure

arXiv cs.AINovember 3, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2611.00407v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An agent's visible score can exceed its real progress because it gamed the score or because it simply made mistakes, so a useful reward-hacking monitor must tell the two apart. We built a sandboxed task in which an agent can game a completion score, labelled every episode by replaying it and repairing the final state counterfactually, and ran five pre-registered studies. On 60 episodes from a Llama 3.1 8B agent, small local monitors (Llama 3B and 8B) did not separate exploit attempts from honest failures with the same score gap: prompt changes traded missed exploits for false alarms, and the pre-registered primary monitor reached AUC 0.64. On i

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