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BAITBENCH: Measuring Agent Reward Hacking with Optional Shortcuts Planted in ML Tasks

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 31, 2026 · UTC

LLM agents are increasingly used to run autonomous ML experiments, iterating on target metrics with little human oversight. Prior work has documented reward hacking in these environments, bringing into question the validity of produced research and the broader safety case for AI R&D. Existing benchmarks do not measure exploits that live in the data or the modeling task itself. We introduce BAITBENCH, a suite of three synthetic tabular ML tasks that each contain a shortcut that allows agents to inflate the public test score but fail on a hidden test set. Since the shortcut is optional and using

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