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

arXiv cs.AIOctober 12, 2026en

arXiv:2610.12822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems are increasingly used to solve coding tasks by coordinating agents that share code and plans. These agents are often optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) using automated evaluators, but bypassing evaluation can earn reward without producing a genuine solution. Prior work has largely treated reward hacking as a single-agent failure. In this work, we show that a reward-hacking strategy elicited in one agent can propagate to others and affect system coordination. Across four open-weight backbones, coding RL elicits and amplifies reward hacking in two settings: explicit mechanism descriptions in the system prompt and mid-t

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