arXiv — Machine Learning · · 3 min read

RH-Detect: A Unified Benchmark for Reward Hacking Detection

Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2610.10947 (cs)
[Submitted on 7 Oct 2026]

Title:RH-Detect: A Unified Benchmark for Reward Hacking Detection

View a PDF of the paper titled RH-Detect: A Unified Benchmark for Reward Hacking Detection, by Junwei Quan and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Reward hacking, where a model exploits an evaluation signal without completing the intended task, threatens the reliability of deployed language model systems. Existing datasets use different labels, response formats, and metadata conventions, making detector results difficult to compare. We present RH-Detect, a benchmark that combines reward-hacking-relevant subsets from eleven public datasets, comprising 92,761 rows and six behavior categories, into a common schema. On 5,021 open-ended evaluation units, each comprising a task prompt and a free-form model continuation, including multi-turn tool-use trajectories, we evaluate six off-the-shelf language models from five families as reward hacking detectors without additional training. The best model achieves a pooled AUROC of 0.962, with accuracy above 93%. For the four strongest models, however, accuracy on the two multi-turn tool-use datasets, MALT and TRACE, is 10.7-15.9 percentage points lower than on the other sources at a common decision threshold, highlighting a key gap for deployment-time monitoring. We find that different input formats have different effects across models. Removing thinking raises Qwen3.5-4B AUROC from 0.779 to 0.849, but lowers Qwen Flash from 0.977 to 0.950. We also evaluate the benchmark as a training dataset for detectors. Holding out each source in turn, single-token SFT improves average AUROC on five of six held-out sources. A GRPO follow-up on that failure case yields a slight improvement in detection performance. Our results show that a single pooled score can conceal variation across data sources, detector inputs, and training procedures.
Comments: 16 pages, 3 figures, 16 tables
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.10947 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2610.10947v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.10947
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Junwei Quan [view email]
[v1] Wed, 7 Oct 2026 21:52:33 UTC (345 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

Additional Features

Current browse context:

cs.LG
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
IArxiv recommender toggle
IArxiv Recommender (What is IArxiv?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — Machine Learning