ResearchResearch paperReinforcement Learning1 source · Oct 19, 2026

Mitigating Reward Hacking in Preference Reward Models with Evolving Penalties

Reinforcement learning for language models has moved from preference reward models to verifiable rewards, which sustain much longer optimization.

Key points

  • Preference models are prone to reward hacking: the policy raises their score without improving response quality, or even while degrading it.
  • We introduce Dynalize, which mitigates reward hacking online, during policy training.
  • For example, we find that our method suppresses patterns incentivized by preference models that, without penalties, spread to most responses, and even to the model's reasoning, which the reward model does not explicitly score.
  • Furthermore, we show that its gains hold in multi-turn training, and even after we retrain the reward model on the discovered behaviors.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Mitigating Reward Hacking in Preference Reward Models with Evolving Penalties
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 19, 02:34 PM
    Reinforcement learning for language models has moved from preference reward models to verifiable rewards, which sustain much longer optimization.
    Preference models are prone to reward hacking: the policy raises their score without improving response quality, or even while degrading it.

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