Robust Optimization for Mitigating Reward Hacking with Correlated Proxies

Zixuan Liu, Xiaolin Sun, Zizhan Zheng

Keywords: Reward hacking, Robust Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them vulnerable to reward hacking, where high proxy returns arise from unintended or exploitative behaviors. Recent work formalizes this issue using $r$-correlation between proxy and true rewards, but existing methods like occupancy-regularized policy optimization (ORPO) optimize against a fixed proxy and do not provide strong guarantees against broader classes of correlated proxies. In this work, we formulate reward hacking as a robust policy optimization problem over the space of all $r$-correlated proxy rewards. We derive a tractable max-min formulation, where the agent maximizes performance under the worst-case proxy consistent with the correlation constraint. We further show that when the reward is a linear function of known features, our approach can be adapted to incorporate this prior knowledge, yielding both improved policies and interpretable worst-case rewards. Experiments across several environments show that our algorithms consistently outperform ORPO in worst-case returns, and offer improved robustness and stability across different levels of proxy–true reward correlation. These results show that our approach provides both robustness and transparency in settings where reward design is inherently uncertain.

Primary Area: Reinforcement learning (e.g., decision and control, planning, hierarchical RL, robotics)

Submission Number: 25047