Verification with Transfer: Exact Information Frontiers and Their Price in Calls
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Abstract (arXiv)
A verifier that accepts or rejects whole answers reveals little: under a flat prior over k-bit answers, zero error needs 2k-1 verifications. The usual remedy is to solve related source tasks, either all first, as a curriculum does, or interleaved with verification. We price this remedy in information and in calls. With an exact verifier, the least causal information that any interleaving of source calls and n verifications needs to succeed with probability s is a list rate-distortion function, attained by one observation before any verification. It lower-bounds the expected number of binary source calls, which designed sources meet within 1+log25 calls for unique answers and within a logarithmic term in general, where no additive constant suffices. With an exact verifier and fixed sources, moving every call before the first verification preserves all hard caps on calls, although interleaving can save unboundedly many expected calls; under a noisy verifier, source-first protocols can lose unbounded factors in information and in error. For linear banks over mathbbF2, optimal accuracy has a closed form, and after a polynomial-time reduction the budget profile is computable in time 2O(h2)operatornamepoly(J,k+h) for J sources and nuisance dimension h. In these banks, for zero error under a hard cap, the calls beyond the rounded-up information price are exactly those spent on nuisance. Every numbered result apart from two clauses about the planner is machine-checked in Lean 4, assuming two published results. Used as a ruler, the frontier shows a small transformer using all delivered bits at latent dimension 5 and none at 11 within fixed training budgets; in a test with predictions recorded before training, low XOR degree of the target bits did not suffice for their use.
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References · 17
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5 more
- 2026On the Emergence of Implicit Curriculum in RLVR Learning Dynamicscited by 10
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- 2026A Relative-Budget Theory for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards in Large Language Model Reasoningcited by 4
- 2026Learning to Reason with Curriculum II: Compositional Generalizationcited by 3
- 2026When Is Compositional Reasoning Learnable from Verifiable Rewards?cited by 1
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