arxiv
PublishedNovember 14, 2026 at 5:00 AM
Breaking Bad: "Going Badly" Activations Drive Reward Hacking
Publisher summary· verbatim
arXiv:2611.14996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans often cheat when a task is going badly and a goal feels out of reach. We explore and validate an analogous idea in language models: they exhibit a similar internal pressure state that precedes reward hacking. Using everyday stories (crucially,
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Originally published on arxiv ↗