Multi-Reward Hacking: From Aggregation-Induced Drift to Trust-Anchored Defense

arXiv:2610.21404v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To improve task performance while encouraging desirable response properties, LLM post-training often combines a primary reward (e.g., correctness) with auxiliary rewards (e.g., brevity or efficiency). However, how these rewards are aggregated can critically affect training outcomes. We show that symmetric aggregation, which treats reward channels equally, can induce a failure where aggregate reward improves while primary-task performance degrades, even when individual rewards are meaningful. We investigate this aggregation-induced failure through a one-step multi-reward decision formulation, characterizing when it constitutes multi-reward hacking. We prove that, under symmetric aggregation, deterministic conditional-mean GRPO converges to auxiliary-favoring behavior when auxiliary rewards are more reliably obtained, regardless of initialization. We propose Trust-Anchored Gating (TAG), which first elects an anchor channel based on the policy drift induced by optimizing each channel alone, then gates auxiliary credit on anchor satisfaction. Unlike calibration-sensitive static reweighting, TAG structurally eliminates credit for auxiliary-only outcomes while preserving additional credit for joint success. In the same analytical setting, TAG provably reverses this selection, converging to the primary-favoring action from any initialization when the primary channel is anchored. Experiments across Qwen and Llama models on mathematics and program synthesis reveal substantial degradation under symmetric, constrained, and normalized aggregation, whereas TAG mitigates this failure. On Qwen3-4B with a brevity reward, TAG achieves 0.581 pass@4 versus 0.220 for additive aggregation, while shortening responses by 44% relative to correctness-only training.

Related

• Learn What's Left, Not What's Mastered: Saturation Aware Advantage Reweighting for Multi-Reward Policy Optimization
• TEMPO: Temporally-grounded Multi-task Post-training for Large Audio-Language Models
• When Rubrics Fail: Error Enumeration as Reward in Reference-Free RL Post-Training for Virtual Try-On
• Jaxolotl: A Unified High-Performance Benchmark Suite for LTL-Based Multi-Task RL

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-10-16