When Outcome Looks Right But Discipline Fails: Trace-Based Evaluation Under Hidden Competitor State
Outcome-only evaluation can certify economically unsafe agents: a policy can hit a business KPI while violating deployable behavioral discipline. In hotel pricing with hidden competitor state, a learner can achieve plausible revenue per available room while failing to preserve the rate discipline of a rule-based revenue-management competitor. We introduce discipline stability, a trace-based evaluation paradigm: define the benchmark behavior, restrict observations to the deployment regime, induce trace diagnostics from failure, separate mechanisms with ablations, and test transfer and deployment. Across a two-hotel benchmark and a compact hidden-budget bidding task, reward-only PPO variant...
| Authors | Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 July 2026 |
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