Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization
Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing t...
| Authors | Frank Xiao, Mary Phuong |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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