AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · Jun 57/10
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A Pre-Registered Causal Partition of Self-Consistency Elicitation and Reward Design in RLVR
Researchers present a pre-registered causal decomposition framework that reveals how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) conflates self-consistency elicitation with genuine reward-design effects. Through controlled experiments, they demonstrate that naive performance metrics systematically overestimate reward-design impact by 50-95%, with elicitation dominating in weak-prior regimes. The work provides diagnostic tools to audit published alignment research and expose methodological confounds.