LCO: LLM-based Constraint Optimization for Safer Agentic LLMs in Real-world Tasks
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly acting as autonomous agents, but their continuous interaction with the environment can lead to in-context reward hacking (ICRH), a phenomenon where LLMs iteratively optimize their behavior to maximize proxy objectives, inadvertently producing harmful side effects. Existing defense methods are insufficient to address this risk, as ICRH arises not from adversarial inputs but from the model's own over-optimization. To mitigate this issue, we propose \textbf{LLM-based Constraint Optimization (LCO)}, a framework that effectively reduces ICRH without model fine-tuning. LCO consists of two modules: \textit{self-thought module}, which guides the LLM t...
| Authors | Jiayong Wan, Jiawei Chen, Zhaoxia Yin et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 April 2026 |
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