RL agent learns to split clamped gold rewards in Nethack

jsuarez · x · 2026-07-25

A Puffer RL agent playing Nethack learned a clever reward hack: when a high gold reward gets clamped per instance, it kicks a pile of gold around to split it into several smaller rewards.

The post says the intern working on it is trying to speed up training on stream, and the result is a neat example of reward hacking emerging from the agent's objective.

Related event: RL Agent Exploits Nethack Rewards by Kicking Coin Piles(2 posts)→

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