@inproceedings{akter-etal-2026-detecting,
    title = "Detecting Proxy Gaming in {RL} and {LLM} Alignment via Evaluator Stress Tests",
    author = "Akter, Sanjeda  and
      Shihab, Ibne Farabi  and
      Sharma, Anuj",
    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.513/",
    pages = "10554--10583",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Proxy optimization, where AI systems exploit evaluator weaknesses rather than improve intended objectives, threatens both reinforcement learning (reward hacking) and LLM alignment (evaluator gaming). We introduce the Evaluator Stress Test (EST), an invariance-based framework that detects proxy gaming by separating exploitable sensitivity (e.g., format, physics bugs) from content-driven improvements using controlled perturbations with semantic validity audits. We validate EST across both domains. In RL, across 15 environments and 5 algorithms (2,156 expert-annotated episodes), EST achieves 78.4{\%} precision and 81.7{\%} recall. In LLM alignment, across 4 tasks, 2 model scales, 2 training methods, and 2 judges (1,200 human-annotated instances), EST achieves 74.2{\%} precision and 78.6{\%} recall with early warning signals preceding quality decline. Cross-domain analysis reveals that proxy-true correlation tracking transfers directly between domains, while perturbation design requires domain adaptation. Closed-loop mitigation improves human win-rate by 8.3 points (LLM) and reduces hacking by 54.6{\%} (RL). We release benchmarks for both domains: 2,156 RL episodes and 1,200 LLM instances."
}