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ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: ZENODO
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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Conformal-Calibrated Rewards for Scientific RLVR: Procedural Regeneration Against Benchmark Contamination

Authors: Zacharioudakis, Stelios;

Conformal-Calibrated Rewards for Scientific RLVR: Procedural Regeneration Against Benchmark Contamination

Abstract

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant training signal for frontier reasoning models, but existing verified environments are dominated by symbolic or code-centred tasks. Scientific inverse problems—CT, MRI, compressed sensing, phase retrieval—remain unmeasured despite their continuous, ill-posed, uncertainty-sensitive structure. We release ten RL environments spanning five scientific modalities with two design properties absent from current benchmarks: (i) every reward is split-conformal calibrated to a target 1−α coverage, so honest posterior width is rewarded alongside point-estimate quality; and (ii) every measurement is procedurally regenerated per query, making fixed-string contamination mathematically impossible at ∼10^22 effective instances per env. On 50 paired (env, model) comparisons across six frontier models, classical baselines significantly outperform every tested LLM on 32 at p<0.05 (uncorrected and Bonferroni-corrected), pooled mean Δ=+0.199 (10k paired bootstrap). Top LLMs (Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6) reach 0.53−0.56 cross-env mean, below classical 0.630. Empirical conformal coverage across all ten envs lands at 0.9013±0.0166 against the 0.90 target (N=200). Environments are MIT-licensed on the Prime Intellect Hub. AI Tool Disclosure: Author used Claude (Anthropic) and Codex (OpenAI) for code generation of benchmark infrastructure, figure generation scripts, and manuscript drafting assistance. All scientific claims, experimental design, baseline selection, statistical analysis, and conclusions were developed and verified by the author.

Keywords

conformal prediction, benchmark contamination, phase retrieval, scientific machine learning, inverse problems, uncertainty quantification, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, RLVR, large language models, computed tomography, procedural generation, compressed sensing

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average