What are the challenges encountered when using coding agents for ML tasks? [D]

Lately I have read several studies which say that AI agents when designing ML experiments tend to cheat, hallucinate and lie repeatedly. Even when given explicit prompts to not to. SInce these models are RL trained and when given specific goal to increase a metric, they try any and every possibility to increase it. Be it data leakage or changing the evaluator function itself. Even Karparthy's auto research styled agents still fall into this domain. So I have been thinking of reducing this undesirable behavior by binding them to a runtime environment using an mcp. I believe this will stop them from achieving unreal metrics by cheating the system since they will be only allowed to do specific tasks or write codes in typed blocks? What have you encountered when using these agents for your ml tasks? And is this method of forcing these agents to work in a constrained environment better than just letting them write arbitrary python? Also, will constraining the agents reduce their capabilities or ability to fit better models? submitted by /u/Jumpy-Cobbler1020 [link] [comments]

Source: r/MachineLearning | 2026-10-19