Reward Auditor: Inference on Reward Modeling Suitability in Real-World Perturbed Scenarios

Reliable reward models (RMs) are critical for ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, current RM evaluation methods focus solely on preference perception accuracies in specific scenarios, obscuring the critical vulnerabilities of RMs in real-world scenarios. We identify that the true challenge lies in assessing a novel dimension: Suitability, defined as conditional reliability under specific realworld perturbations. To this end, we introduce Reward Auditor, a hypothesis-testing framework specifically designed for RM suitability inference. Rather than answering "How accurate is the RM's preference perception for given samples?", it employs scientific auditing to answer: "Can we infer that RMs exhibit systematic vulnerabilities in specific real-world scenarios?". Under real-world perturbed scenarios, Reward Auditor quantifies statistical significance and effect size by auditing distribution degradation of RM preference perception confidence. This enables inference of both the certainty and severity of RM vulnerabilities across real-world scenarios, thereby laying a solid foundation for building next-generation LLM alignment systems that are verifiably safe, more robust, and trustworthy. Codes available: https:// github.com/hggzjx/RewardAuditor .