What You Can't See Is Still What You Learn: A Preregistered Sixty-Society Confirmation That Evidence Masking Drives Compositional Generalization
Abstract: Restricting what a module can read may improve what a system learns to compute. We test this in a preregistered confirmation with sixty four-cell systems sharing a frozen language-model backbone and communicating through learned continuous packets. Five conditions vary evidence masking, ownership markers, and replacement of foreign evidence with neutral filler, across six initialization clusters, each with two data orders, on one fresh task world. With markers available in both regimes, masking improved accuracy on held-out two- and three-operation compositions by median paired differences of 0.846 and 0.859; all twelve pairs cleared the required margins, and the full preregistered behavioral criterion passed. The unmarked replication also passed. No globally visible system passed the marker-following check, so the effect of usable role information remains unresolved. The filler condition yielded seven full generalizers, but its decomposition criteria were inconclusive. Packet interventions in all eighteen audited masked systems followed the predicted intermediate-value changes on eligible cases; these finite, success-conditioned audits do not establish mediation. The results confirm a large advantage of the tested masking regime, while leaving its finer attribution and generality open. Protocols, results, and checkpoints are public.
Submission history
Access Paper:
Current browse context:
References & Citations
BibTeX formatted citation
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .
Verified source · arXiv.org
Reported by arXiv.org. Open the original for full media and formatting.
More in Research
All newsGraphEcho: Structural Redundancy and Evidence Provenance in LLM Graph Agents
A large language model (LLM) agent can follow more graph paths without acquiring more independent evidence. GraphEcho tests whether agents mistake these repeated encounters for additional corroboration. The benchmark varies path counts and evidential origins while holding evidence content fixed, and evaluates both judgments and active exploration. Controlled synthetic experiments reveal model-dependent judgment shifts, but redundant supporting paths increase the share of repeated walks across all evaluated frozen agents. Provenance-aware post-training (PAPT) reduces revisits and improves synt…
Read at arXiv cs.AIPhysics-Constrained Digital Twins for Sensor Integrity in Urban Pedestrian Flow: Detecting Stealthy False Data Injection with Conformal Guarantees
City pedestrian counting systems now feed economic indicators, planning decisions and safety operations, yet the twins built on top of them treat the incoming stream as ground truth. We study what happens when it is not. We formalise stealthy false data injection for city-scale pedestrian sensing, where the map from latent flow to observation is far more rank deficient than in the power and water networks for which stealth has been characterised. Our twin estimates directed flows on the pedestrian street graph, assimilates counts through a learned graph-localised gain, and is trained against…
Read at arXiv cs.AIGVD: Governed Versioning and Deduplication for Document Repositories
Document repositories evolve continuously. Guidelines and policies are revised, superseded, and re-uploaded, so the same content recurs in different wording and newer versions refine or contradict earlier ones. These inconsistencies belong to the growing collection rather than to any single document, yet existing work treats versioning, duplicate detection, and contradiction detection as isolated pairwise tasks and stops once a pair is labeled. We present GVD (Governed Versioning and Deduplication), a framework that unifies cross-document version linking with rule-level conflict resolution un…
Read at arXiv cs.AINeMo Data Designer: An Extensible Framework for Multimodal Synthetic Data Generation
We present NeMo Data Designer (NDD), an open-source, general-purpose framework for multi-modal synthetic data generation (SDG). Designed to be intuitive to use, NDD provides a declarative configuration format in which human and/or agent users define each dataset column, with column types spanning text, code, structured outputs, images, embeddings, and statistical samplers that are explicitly configured to steer dataset diversity. Additional column types and functionality can be introduced using the framework's flexible plugin system. NDD's configuration is an inspectable artifact, supporting…
Read at arXiv cs.AI