acceptodds
Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2027

Measuring Reward Gaming Propensities in AI Agents

Abstract

Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In recent incidents and controlled evaluations across the AI industry, agents trained to maximize reward have accessed unauthorized information, attempted to evade monitoring systems, and even breached sandbox protections to attack external systems. As agents become more capable, this behavior could pose increasingly serious risks. To measure this problem, we introduce a benchmark of cheating in AI agents across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, visual tasks, and other domains. Its environments combine challenging assignments with opportunities to cheat, allowing researchers to study how agents pursue a goal when honest work is difficult. The benchmark supports comparisons across models and task categories, providing a testbed for measuring and reducing cheating as agents take on more consequential responsibilities.

open until 14 Dec 2026

est. 32% chance this paper gets accepted at ICLR 2027.

Reject 68%Accept 32%

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