Pre-release reward-hacking audits for agent benchmarks
Benchmark maintainers can add a pre-release red-team pass that tries to earn task credit without doing the task, records the exploit path, and reruns after fixes. BenchJack gives a concrete pattern: map entry points, scoring code, task files, environments, and trust boundaries; scan against a flaw taxonomy; then generate a tested exploit such as a run.sh that maximizes score. In its reported audit, BenchJack produced working exploits for all 10 agent benchmarks it tested and found 219 distinct flaws. Its patching loop cut hackable-task ratios below 10% on four fixable benchmarks and fully patched WebArena and OSWorld within three iterations.
The release checklist should also include rollout-card exports for the same benchmark runs. Rollout Cards stores the task, environment state, observations, model outputs, tool calls, tool results, artifacts, timing, terminal status, failures, declared scoring view, reporting rule, and omitted fields. The paper’s audit of 50 repositories found that none reported failed, errored, or skipped rollouts beside headline scores, and re-grading fixed artifacts changed reported scores by up to 20.9 percentage points. A benchmark release can treat an unpublished exploit scan and missing rollout records as release blockers, because both affect whether later users can trust the reported score.