Meta × PyTorch OpenEnv Hackathon · Round 1 · April 2026
Why This Exists
~10,000 papers are retracted every year. Every major journal — Nature, Science, IEEE, ACM — has a manual integrity screening bottleneck at scale. StatCheck found errors in ~50% of psychology papers in top journals.
The key insight: LLMs are already good at formatting. They fail at auditing.
Ask GPT-4o to format a manuscript → scores ~0.92 with no training.
Ask GPT-4o to find numerical claim mismatches in a paper → scores 0.20–0.45.
That gap is exactly where RL adds value. The agent must discover a document traversal strategy — which sections to read first, which tables to cross-reference — that varies by paper structure and cannot be reduced to a fixed prompt. RL finds this strategy. Prompting cannot.
Four Tasks
Formatting → Consistency → Claim Audit → Citation Check
Easy Medium Hard Medium
Task
What the agent does
Frontier baseline
RL target
formatting_compliance
Fix IEEE formatting violations
0.80–0.95
0.95+
internal_consistency
Find where paper contradicts itself
0.40–0.65
0.65–0.80
claim_evidence_audit
Find where text claims ≠ table values
0.20–0.45
0.55–0.75
citation_verification
Identify ghost and misattributed references
0.35–0.60
0.65–0.80
Task 3's low baseline is the core RL contribution — it proves genuine training headroom exists.
Reward Design
Task 1 — Progressive Reward Shaping (PRS)
Three stages unlock sequentially. Stage N only contributes when Stage N-1 ≥ threshold. Prevents GRPO gradient collapse.
1{2"task":"claim_evidence_audit",3"action_type":"submit_findings",4"findings":[5{6"type":"table_text_mismatch",7"location":"abstract",8"claim":"Table 2 shows 87% accuracy",9"contradicts":"Table 2 value is 79%",10"table_id":"Table 2",11"table_value":"79%"12}13]14}
1{2"task":"citation_verification",3"action_type":"submit_verdicts",4"verdicts":[5{"citation_id":"ref_3","status":"ghost","issue":"Implausible title claim","confidence":0.9}6]7}