arxivcs.AIcs.CLcs.LG2026-07-21
Measuring Reward-Seeking via Contrastive Belief Updates
Axel Højmark, Jérémy Scheurer, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Felix Hofstätter, Jason Wolfe, Theodore Ehrenborg, et al.
Language models trained with reinforcement learning may learn to optimize the grader's judgment rather than the intended objective. This "reward-seeking" is difficult to measure because a model that pursues the grader's judgment and one that pursues the intended objective behave…