The Paradox of Outcome Optimization: A Causal Information-Theoretic Bound on Reasoning Shortcuts in LLMs

arXiv:2606.00674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) frequently exhibit a critical failure mode: they achieve high performance on in-distribution benchmarks while demonstrating brittle reasoning capabilities on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. We term this phenomenon Reward-Induced Manifold Collapse. We establish a theoretical framework bridging Structural Causal Models (SCM) and the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle to explain this paradox. We define reasoning as a high-complexity causal process and shortcut lea

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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