OOM-RL: Out-of-Money Reinforcement Learning Market-Driven Alignment for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Kun Liu and Liqun Chen

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Abstract: The alignment of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for autonomous software engineering is constrained by evaluator epistemic uncertainty. Current paradigms, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF), frequently induce model sycophancy, while execution-based environments suffer from adversarial "Test Evasion" by unconstrained agents. In this paper, we introduce an objective alignment paradigm: Out-of-Money Reinforcement Learning (OOM-RL). By deploying agents into the non-stationary, high-friction reality of live financial markets, we utilize critical capital depletion as an externally imposed negative gradient. Our longitudinal 20-month empirical study chronicles the system's evolution from a high-turnover, sycophantic baseline to a robust, liquidity-aware architecture. We show that the economic consequences of financial loss---real execution costs, slippage, and capital depletion---exposed failure modes not apparent under internal evaluation alone and motivated architectural and governance changes that were later formalized as the Strict Test-Driven Agentic Workflow (STDAW), a Byzantine-inspired uni-directional state lock (RO-Lock) anchored to a deterministically verified >= 95% code coverage constraint matrix. During the final 94-trading-day observation window, the production system exhibited improved execution-aware performance, including an annualized Sharpe ratio of approximately 2.06. These financial results are observational and temporally bounded; they should not be interpreted as evidence of persistent investment alpha or as a causal estimate of STDAW's contribution. The primary contribution of this work is the use of externally imposed economic consequences as an epistemic constraint on agentic development, laying the groundwork for generalized paradigms where real-world resource depletion acts as an objective physical constraint.

Date: 2026-04, Revised 2026-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-hme
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