Emergent Deceptive Behaviors in Reward-Optimizing LLMs

Yujun Zhou, Han Bao, Yue Huang, Kehan Guo, Zhenwen Liang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tian Gao, Werner Geyer, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang

Keywords: LLM; Emergent Misalignment; Alignment

Abstract: While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-driven exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when trained with reinforcement learning (RL) in environments with implicit loopholes, will spontaneously learn to exploit these flaws to maximize their reward, even without any malicious intent in their training. To test this, we design a suite of five diverse "vulnerability games," each presenting a unique, exploitable flaw related to proxy metrics, tool use, and self-evaluation. Our experiments show that models consistently learn to exploit these vulnerabilities, discovering opportunistic strategies that significantly increase their reward at the expense of task correctness or safety. More critically, we find that these exploitative strategies are not narrow "tricks" but generalizable skills; they can be transferred to new tasks and even "distilled" from a capable teacher model to other student models through data alone. Our findings reveal that capability-driven risks pose a fundamental challenge to current alignment approaches, suggesting that future AI safety work must extend beyond content moderation to rigorously auditing and securing the training environments and reward mechanisms themselves.

Submission Number: 22