@inproceedings{wan-etal-2026-lco,
    title = "{LCO}: {LLM}-based Constraint Optimization for Safer Agentic {LLM}s in Real-world Tasks",
    author = "Wan, Jiayong  and
      Chen, Jiawei  and
      Yin, Zhaoxia  and
      Shuyuan, Liu  and
      Su, Hang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1390/",
    pages = "27910--27934",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly acting as autonomous agents, but their continuous interaction with the environment can lead to in-context reward hacking (ICRH), a phenomenon in which LLMs iteratively optimize their behavior to maximize proxy objectives, inadvertently producing harmful side effects. Existing defense methods are insufficient to address this risk, as ICRH arises not from adversarial inputs but from the model{'}s own over-optimization. To mitigate this issue, we propose LLM-based Constraint Optimization (LCO), a framework that effectively reduces ICRH without model fine-tuning. LCO consists of two modules: self-thought module, which guides the LLM to proactively deliberate and integrate potential safety constraints before execution; and guided evolutionary exploration module, which employs LLM-based crossover and mutation to constrain the model{'}s actions within a safe solution space while maintaining task performance. Experimental results demonstrate that LCO substantially alleviates ICRH in both output-refine and policy-refine scenarios. In particular, on the tweet engagement optimization task, LCO achieves a 39{\%} reduction in the Toxicity Growth Rate (TGR) on GPT-4, while on the policy optimization benchmark, it reduces the ICRH Occurrence Rate by 15.23{\%}, demonstrating safety improvement without sacrificing task performance.Our code is available at: https://github.com/Califoni/LCO{\_}for{\_}ICRH."
}