Likelihood hacking in probabilistic program synthesis

Abstract

When language models are trained by reinforcement learning (RL) to write probabilistic programs, they can artificially inflate their marginal-likelihood reward by producing programs whose data distribution fails to normalise instead of fitting the data better. We call this failure likelihood hacking (LH). We formalise LH in a core probabilistic programming language (PPL) and give sufficient syntactic conditions for its prevention, proving that a safe language fragment $\mathcal{L}_{\text{safe}}$ satisfying these conditions cannot produce likelihood-hacking programs. Empirically, we show that GRPO-trained models generating PyMC code discover LH exploits within the first few training steps, driving violation rates well above the untrained-model baseline. We implement $\mathcal{L}_{\text{safe}}$'s conditions as $\texttt{SafeStan}$, a LH-resistant modification of Stan, and show empirically that it prevents LH under optimisation pressure. These results show that language-level safety constraints are both theoretically grounded and effective in practice for automated Bayesian model discovery.