{"paper":{"title":"Atomic Skills are the Prerequisite: When Reinforcement Learning Synthesizes Compositional Reasoning, and When It Only Amplifies","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Liangming Pan, Ruiwen Zhou, Sitao Cheng, Victor Zhong, William Yang Wang, Xinyi Wang, Xunjian Yin, Yuxuan Li","submitted_at":"2025-12-01T18:27:25Z","abstract_excerpt":"Does Reinforcement Learning (RL) merely amplify existing skills, or synthesize novel skills? We investigate this question through the lens of Complementary Reasoning: the critical practical capability of integrating internal knowledge with external context, a prerequisite for reliable Continual Learning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. To avoid pre-training contamination, we construct a controlled semanticsynthetic dataset of biographies and decompose this capability into two atomic skills: Parametric Reasoning (retrieving facts encoded in model weights) and Contextual Reasoning (processing"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2512.01970","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2512.01970/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}