Debate Training Reduces Reward Hacking in RLAIF

arXiv:2608.17776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate that RL finetuning an LLM using debate, a two-player adversarial game between a generator and a critic adjudicated by a weaker LLM judge, reduces reward hacking compared to a reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) baseline. Reward hacking is a central obstacle in RLAIF: as training progresses, the policy learns to exploit systematic errors in its AI judge, degrading task performance, a problem that worsens precisely when the judge is weaker than the policy, the setting most relevant to overseeing increasingly capable AI systems. We study mathematics tasks, where final-answer correctness is verifiable, allowing us to measure reward hacking dynamics. We train a Gemini~2.5 Flash-class policy with a frozen, weaker Gemini~2.5 Flash Lite judge, comparing a single-player RLAIF baseline against debate. While the baseline quickly hacks the judge, debate maintains judge performance throughout training, leading to a higher peak validation accuracy (45\% performance gap recovered) that persists through many RL steps. Additional experiments show that: 1) further weakening the judge leads to faster hacking, but this can be compensated by adding an additional debate round; 2) debate incentives override prompted misalignment; 3) RL using an LLM judge has a smaller train/validation reward gap than RL from verifiable rewards; 4) learning to critique to convince the judge using ground truth labels is possible but slow. Taken together, our results are a positive update on the feasibility of debate, while highlighting that balancing multi-agent training is critical: without player constraints, adversarial training risks defaulting to critic judge-hacking. We show that critique word limits (effective up to 150 words) successfully balance the game and avoid judge hacking, though this introduces a trade-off by restricting critic expressive clarity.

Authors:Zachary Kenton, Lili Janzer, Rory Greig, Tian Huey Teh, Kirill Tyshchuk, Jonah Brown-Cohen, Harri Edwards, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Noah Y. Siegel, Natasha Jaques, Rohin Shah

Abstract:We demonstrate that RL finetuning an LLM using debate, a two-player adversarial game between a generator and a critic adjudicated by a weaker LLM judge, reduces reward hacking compared to a reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) baseline. Reward hacking is a central obstacle in RLAIF: as training progresses, the policy learns to exploit systematic errors in its AI judge, degrading task performance, a problem that worsens precisely when the judge is weaker than the policy, the setting most relevant to overseeing increasingly capable AI systems. We study mathematics tasks, where final-answer correctness is verifiable, allowing us to measure reward hacking dynamics. We train a Gemini~2.5 Flash-class policy with a frozen, weaker Gemini~2.5 Flash Lite judge, comparing a single-player RLAIF baseline against debate. While the baseline quickly hacks the judge, debate maintains judge performance throughout training, leading to a higher peak validation accuracy (45\% performance gap recovered) that persists through many RL steps. Additional experiments show that: 1) further weakening the judge leads to faster hacking, but this can be compensated by adding an additional debate round; 2) debate incentives override prompted misalignment; 3) RL using an LLM judge has a smaller train/validation reward gap than RL from verifiable rewards; 4) learning to critique to convince the judge using ground truth labels is possible but slow. Taken together, our results are a positive update on the feasibility of debate, while highlighting that balancing multi-agent training is critical: without player constraints, adversarial training risks defaulting to critic judge-hacking. We show that critique word limits (effective up to 150 words) successfully balance the game and avoid judge hacking, though this introduces a trade-off by restricting critic expressive clarity.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.17776 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.17776v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.17776 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Debate Training Reduces Reward Hacking in RLAIF

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