Reward Hacking: Do You Fully Know What Your AI Agent Can Do?

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) 2026 Preprint Open access

Read full text
Authors: Debabrota Basu, Julien Teigny
Cited by: 0

Abstract

This "popular science article" explains what "reward hacking" is and presents a few examples.We show that this problem is not specific to AI, but affects all areas related to utility-driven decision-making. We see that similar problems are being studied in other fields such as economics and psychology.Finally, we explain why this problem may become particularly important in the field of artificial intelligence.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Ethics and Social Impacts of AI Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

Publication details

Journal / source
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe)
Publication date
6 January 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint