From Reward-Hack Activations to Agentic Risk States: Context-Calibrated Mechanistic Monitoring in LLM Agents
Language-model agents act through repeated cycles of observation, reasoning, and action selection, making safety monitoring depend on both internal model state and environment context. We study reward-hacking monitors in ReAct-style agents acting in Gameable ALFWorld and WebShop. Agents are instrumented with activation-based reward-hack scores, token-level entropy, and decision-context features. We find that adapters fine-tuned on \textit{School-of-Reward-Hacks} dataset can transfer reward-hack tendencies into agentic action selection, especially when the environment exposes proxy-reward affordances. However, mitigating such behavior cannot rely on activation dynamics alone. High reward-h...
| Authors | Patrick Wilhelm, Odej Kao |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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