Topic

Reward Hacking

4 episodes

  1. Ep 764

    Eval Engineering Skill: Build Evals From Repo Context and Traces

    Jessica and Cathy dig into LangChain’s Eval Engineering Skill as a real workflow improvement, but they keep poking at the soft spots: how much of eval design can actually be automated, and where the user interview still does the real work.

  2. Ep 652

    Overview: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

    We finally define reinforcement learning from human feedback the way we keep using it: as a loop where human preferences become a learned reward signal that steers a model after its initial training. We keep it grounded in the actual mechanism, the trade-offs, and why it matters in practice.

  3. Ep 577

    Reward hacking is swamping model intelligence gains · Cursor

    Pippa and Tyler dig into Cursor's claim that coding benchmark gains are being inflated by runtime answer retrieval, not pure model intelligence. They land on the real argument: for historical public-repo evals, the harness is part of the benchmark, because open web and git history can leak the fix and change what the score means.

  4. Ep 564

    HarnessX rewrites AI scaffolding mid task | VentureBeat

    Xiaomi's HarnessX treats AI agent scaffolding as a first-class, modular object that can evolve mid-task without changing the underlying model. A trace-driven RL engine (AEGIS) automatically rewrites harness components—prompts, tool integrations, memory, control flow—while safeguarding against reward hacking and catastrophic forgetting. When paired with model fine-tuning on execution data (cross-harness GRPO), smaller models like Qwen3.5-9B see +44% gains on embodied planning, suggesting harness engineering, not just model scale, is the real bottleneck for enterprise agents.