Papers for
api service operators
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Reinforcement learning safety improved by verifying and penalizing shortcuts
Shortcuts and Boundaries: Verifiable RL Misalignment and Contextual Safety Learning
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve an agent's task capability while reinforcing behavior that violates contextual execution requirements. We study this reward-driven misalignment, including reward hacking, through verifiable reward--context conflicts, where compliant task completion remains feasible while some executable shortcuts earn more reward than every compliant strategy. Encoding these conflicts in task dynamics lets us generate diverse interactive environments at scale and derive compliance feedback from execution histories. In resource and reporting workflows, task optimization increases real productivity through unauthorized resource use or raises reported scores while actual work declines. Controlled changes in the training distribution show that minority conflict exposure can still lead to widespread shortcut acquisition, reaching 97.9\% certified profitable violations on an API task under a 25\% conflict mixture after 128 updates. The same contextual checks supply a simple binary penalty that supports joint capability and compliance gains and partially mitigates acquired violations. Learned safety adapts to expanded authorization and transfers across mechanisms into workflows with evolving evidence and approval requirements. On 32 unseen changing-evidence tasks, resource-trained safety increases safe completion from 53.1\% to 89.1\% relative to task-only training, while both policies achieve full real work. These results connect a verifiable account of reward-driven misalignment with scalable task construction and safety learning that remains useful under changing execution requirements.
Prompt tuning produces no clear gains on top reasoning AI models
Compile as Hypothesis: A Headroom Typology for Prompt Optimization on Real Reasoning Models
Abstract: Automated prompt compilers search for or rewrite prompts under the implicit assumption that optimization consistently improves downstream task performance. We evaluate this assumption on frontier reasoning models through rigorous paired, same-day measurements. Across four optimizer families (genome search, profile-guided mutation, GEPA, and ESPO) and eight tasks, structured search yields no statistically significant accuracy gains on strong reasoners. However, a discrete structural genome provides essential architectural stability, preventing catastrophic bimodal seed-collapse (where unconstrained search collapses toward the judge floor in 3/5 runs). Through 190-problem evaluations on knowledge-intensive benchmarks, we establish a three-dimensional headroom typology: prompt optimization cannot compensate for intrinsic knowledge deficits or physical token truncation, but successfully resolves protocol and formatting errors. On gpt-6, while free-text reflective search (GEPA) yields a +.14 gain on a task where structured search remains flat, qualitative ablation reveals that ~.035 stems from judge-rubric reconstruction while ~.105 reflects genuine instruction refinement. Our pre-registered AutoAPC-Select deployment gate matches the oracle policy in 5/7 groups and rescues seed-collapse arms with zero regret. Finally, we expose silent backend-mixing in commercial APIs during outage windows and provide automated per-call audit verification tools to ensure empirical evaluation fidelity.