Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
image/svg+xml art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos Open Access logo, converted into svg, designed by PLoS. This version with transparent background. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos http://www.plos.org/ ZENODOarrow_drop_down
image/svg+xml art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos Open Access logo, converted into svg, designed by PLoS. This version with transparent background. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos http://www.plos.org/
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: ZENODO
image/svg+xml Jakob Voss, based on art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina and Beao Closed Access logo, derived from PLoS Open Access logo. This version with transparent background. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Closed_Access_logo_transparent.svg Jakob Voss, based on art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina and Beao
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
versions View all 2 versions
addClaim

When More Data Hurts: A Directional Goodhart Condition for Multi-Stakeholder Preference Learning

Authors: Kartik Ganapati Bhat;

When More Data Hurts: A Directional Goodhart Condition for Multi-Stakeholder Preference Learning

Abstract

Multi-stakeholder recommendation systems optimize proxy objectives that may harm unobserved stakeholders. We identify a precise condition governing when this occurs: in Bradley-Terry (BT) preference learning with K stakeholders, additional training data degrades a hidden stakeholder's expected utility if and only if the cosine similarity between the learned weight vectors of the optimization target and the hidden stakeholder is negative. We validate this directional Goodhart condition on 32 data points with | cos | > 0.2 across 4 datasets (MovieLens-100K, MovieLens-1M, MIND, Amazon Kindle), 13 stakeholders, and 3 feature families (D {19, 32, 35} dimensions), with 100% accuracy (32/32) under softmax-weighted evaluation and 91% (29/32) under hard top-K selection. We also show that a standard Pareto frontier metric (Hausdorff distance) produces a false positive Goodhart signal on synthetic data where the condition correctly predicts no harm. Two precisions emerge from the cross-dataset analysis. First, the relevant cosine is between BT-trained weight vectors, not raw stakeholder weights; on high-dimensional sparse features, BT training remaps the cosine geometry (up to 3 of 10 pairs flip sign on MIND). Second, the condition governs expected utility under the learned score distribution; under hard top-K selection, it can reverse for stakeholders with high utility variance near the selection boundary (5 of 20 MIND pairs, 0 of 8 Amazon, 0 of 6 MovieLens). The reversal vanishes at softmax temperature T ≥ 1. Applied to X's (formerly Twitter) open-sourced recommendation algorithm, the Goodhart risk reduces to one observable: whether the platform treats negative signals (blocks, reports) as positive engagement. We provide an audit toolkit, a data budget analysis (median 34 preference pairs to recover 50% of hidden stakeholder harm across 16 dataset-stakeholder configurations), and practical guidance for platform transparency under the EU Digital Services Act.

Keywords

Goodhart's law, Pareto optimization, Bradley-Terry, preference learning, content recommendation, EU Digital Services Act, RLHF, reward modeling, multi-stakeholder recommendation, algorithmic auditing

  • BIP!
    Impact byBIP!
    selected citations
    These citations are derived from selected sources.
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    0
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Average
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green