What Happens to the Goal? Distinct Failures of Policy Alignment in Goal Misgeneralization
Goal misgeneralization is a common failure mode in which an agent behaves competently out of distribution but does not pursue the intended goal. However, we still have a weak understanding of what happens to the intended goal in misgeneralizing agents. Across three Procgen environments and five robot tasks, we find three distinct forms of policy-goal misalignment: (1) functional target substitution, where behavior follows an alternative goal, (2) a policy shortcut, where behavior follows a learned action strategy, and (3) cue competition between intended and proxy goal cues. We distinguish these regimes by tracing where goal information remains available internally, how strongly it influe...
| Authors | Julia Barth, Armin Sommer, Kunvar Thaman et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 14 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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