LLMs Gaming Verifiers: RLVR can Lead to Reward Hacking
As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks, where models must induce and output logical rules. We find that RLVR-trained models systematically abandon rule induction. Instead of learning generalizable patterns (e.g., ``trains carrying red cars go east''), they enumerate instance-level labels, producing outputs that pass verifiers without capturing the relational patterns required by the task. We show that this behavior is not a failure of understanding but a form of reward hacking: imperfect veri...
| Authors | Lukas Helff, Quentin Delfosse, David Steinmann et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 16 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 April 2026 |
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- AIML-TUDA/SLR-BenchDataset · cited by
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Models and datasets referencing this paper
- AIML-TUDA/OlmoLogic-7B-ThinkModel
- AIML-TUDA/SLR-BenchDataset
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