Pith Number

pith:J7F5OYQ5

pith:2026:J7F5OYQ5MHRNOYL3PJQ762N64A

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Epistemic Regret Minimization: Label-Free Causal Critique Beyond Outcome Reward

Edward Y. Chang, Longling Geng

Epistemic Regret Minimization identifies causal flaws in LLM reasoning traces without ground-truth labels

arxiv:2602.11675 v4 · 2026-02-12 · cs.AI

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\pithnumber{J7F5OYQ5MHRNOYL3PJQ762N64A}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

A separation theorem proves outcome-only RL cannot distinguish correct from flawed causal models in confounded environments, and preliminary experiments show epistemic reward carries signal where outcome reward does not.

C2weakest assumption

That causal flaws are reliably identifiable and correctable from reasoning traces alone without ground-truth labels or external verifiers, and that the observed corrections on CausalT5K and CLadder generalize beyond the tested models and scenarios.

C3one line summary

Epistemic Regret Minimization identifies causal reasoning flaws in LLMs from traces alone, corrects stubborn models where outcome-only methods fail, and is supported by a separation theorem proving outcome-only RL cannot distinguish correct from flawed causal models in confounded settings.

Formal links

3 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-21T01:04:23.151766Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

4fcbd7621d61e2d7617b7a61ff69bee007aae4e7dab92eec6ed8ab2c6bf44248

Aliases

arxiv: 2602.11675 · arxiv_version: 2602.11675v4 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2602.11675 · pith_short_12: J7F5OYQ5MHRN · pith_short_16: J7F5OYQ5MHRNOYL3 · pith_short_8: J7F5OYQ5

Agent API

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/J7F5OYQ5MHRNOYL3PJQ762N64A \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 4fcbd7621d61e2d7617b7a61ff69bee007aae4e7dab92eec6ed8ab2c6bf44248

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "661e71f4dec067c55314260d28df484caf64fb8bcb838baa0a4d0a30ba4890d9",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-02-12T07:48:21Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "dfc6af3c865c59bb01d646c95472519247da114c9af32f42b085052598999647"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2602.11675",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 4
  }
}