Conflicting Supervision Moves Commitment, Not Capability: A 12.29σ arrangement effect that is exactly zero under a convention-agnostic score
Organizations: University of Macau
Abstract
"Train a model on the same problems written under two incompatible conventions, both correct, and ask what the ordering of that data writes into the parameters. The learning-rate schedule is not a background condition for that question. It is the averaging operator, and it decides the answer. We prove a bound in which the arrangement and the schedule enter the ordering effect as separate multiplied factors: the arrangement only as a block period, the schedule only as how much weight the endpoint can place on any one moment of the run. A decaying schedule cannot put a large step size and an uncontracted remainder at the same moment; a constant one does exactly that at the last step. That decay moderates ordering effects has been reported in pretraining; the mechanism, the separation, and a controlled measurement of both halves are ours. Ten orderings of one corpus, one budget, everything but the path held fixed, run twice under families differing in lr_scheduler_type and nothing else: at a constant rate the interior spans 0.2221 in allocation, 11.63 contrast floors, monotone in how blocked the arrangement is. Under the single cosine every published arm uses, the same ten arms occupy two distinguishable states where their own resolution would allow about ten. "Order matters" and "order does not matter" are the two ends of one knob. What the path writes is which convention the model commits to, and no exact-match benchmark can see it. Across twelve arms acc_A+acc_B is constant to within 9.7% while the allocation share runs 0.04 to 0.87, so the 12.29-sigma arrangement switch this paper measures is exactly zero under a convention-agnostic metric. That conservation is quoted from the decayed family throughout, the constant-rate one being a noisier place to read it. Marking the convention in the prompt collapses the switch and reaches 87.5% of the union ceiling."
Figures & tables
| cf2 (flagship) | nat | status | |
| what the two conventions are | |||
| construction | boxed answer vs. that | numeral vs. spelled out | — |
| is either wrong? | yes, by construction | neither | claim is about nat |
| rows per condition | — | ||
| learning rate | nat ran colder | ||
| how strong an instrument each is | |||
| build | control | conflict | conflict | verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1 algebra pool, epoch | ( ) | positive control fails | ||
| v2 pooled skills, epochs | ( ) | control inert, switch fires | ||
| v3 the learning budget, lr | ( ) | control inert, switch fires |
| arm | capability | share of | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| only | ||||
| only | ||||
| shuf | ||||
| purerand | ||||
| – | – | – | – | |
| ( blocked ) |
| transition | count | frac | transition | count | frac |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (re-labelled) | (newly solved) | ||||
| (never solved) | (lost) | ||||
| (stable) | (newly solved) | ||||
| (stable) | (lost) | ||||
| (re-labelled) | ties, either side |
| arm | cosine | constant | difference | floors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| shuf (mixed within batch) | ||||
| (rr11) | (rr21) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| share | capability | share | capability | |
| mean-field prediction | — | — | ||
| shuf (measured) | ||||
| blocked | ||||
| only (guard: floor) | ||||
| allocation share of | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| intervention | mean-field prediction | measured | miss | moves the share? |
| mixture ratio | yes, as predicted | |||
| block length | no change predicted | — | no ( – ) | |
| batch purity, fixed blocks | no change predicted | — | no ( of the span) | |
| palindromic reordering | no change predicted | — | no (and worse) | |
| check | registered bar | measured | |
| S3 order effect of a palindrome | to machine precision | passes | |
| S1 median | over draws (IQR – ); of draws below the bar | fails | |
| S2 log–log slopes in differ | by | both slopes to four figures across | fails |
| the penalty across a refinement of the step, which is what “no order to improve” means | |||
| blocked | |||
| axis swept | on the path? | share, one end to the other | contrast floors |
|---|---|---|---|
| stopping phase, shuf against blocked | yes | ||
| model scale, 3B to 14B | no | ||
| mixture ratio, 1:1 to 2:1 | no | ||
| cosine restart, byte-identical path | no | ||
| block length, to | yes | ||
| batch purity at fixed block structure | yes |
| read-out | quantity | unkeyed | keyed | verdict |
| C | arrangement switch | ( floors) | ( floors) | C1 : it collapses |
| L | mean accuracy | L4 : partial unlock | ||
| against ceiling | of the gap | |||
| against L1 target | — | short by floors | ||
| the residue, and why it is coverage rather than difficulty | ||||
| marked - only on the numeral evaluation | the key selects | |||
| quantity | Qwen2.5-7B | Qwen3-8B-Base | read-out | |
| guards | minority convention written, | — | ||
| on the synthetic conflict | G1 passes | |||
| switch present, on that corpus | fl | fl | G2 passes | |
| the key | unkeyed | ( fl) | ( fl) | |
| keyed | ( fl) | ( fl) | K1 collapses | |
| marked mean against its ceiling | L4 partial |
| registered claim | the rule, frozen first | what came back | verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| v1 batch composition carries the switch | purerand near blocked purity; near shuf order | purerand against shuf , blocked : purity is of the span | dead |
| v2 optimiser memory cancels contested directions | a response turning on at , or at | flat through both onsets, ; only rises | dead |
| Strang a palindromic schedule beats a blocked one | S1 median ; S2 slopes differ by | S1 ; S2 both slopes ; S3 passes | dead |
| T1 allocation tracks the mixture weights | share within of mean-field and | and : misses and , both toward the pretrained prior | held |
| Ladder every block length lands at the interleaved allocation | within noise of shuf ’s own share | – against shuf ’s | held |
| M1 the mirror relocates antisymmetrically at fixed | ending on moves the same magnitude to the other side | against , capability moves | held |
| share | |||||
| rung | control (one cosine) | treatment (two) | (crit ) | guard | |
| primary | fl | ||||
| fl | SC-3 | passes | |||
| secondary | fl | ||||
| fl | SC-2 | passes | |||
| for scale: the entire block-length ladder, through , moves the share | |||||
| inference time (CCH) | training time (this paper) |
|---|---|
| bounded state , budget | the parameters, reached only through the update path |
| the stream: bindings distractors, kernel | the data path; conflict between sources |
| compressive channel (state mixing) | the averaging limit: only the path’s time-average is written (§ 4.3 ) |
| horizon wall: a fixed window; deferral, not escape | the stopping phase: recency as the one non-average term (§ 5 ) |
| verbatim index channel, cost | a query-time key in the data; selection moves from path to query (§ 5.1 ) |
| write-time code separability (Assumption 1) | the key selects only among conventions already written: vs (§ 5.1 ) |
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| the mechanism, in-model (random non-commuting pairs, lazy regime) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| sign reversal of | across the budget sweep | of draws | |
| sign reversal of | across the budget sweep | ||
| the same, at | step size is not the cause | / | |
| median rotation at the crossing | sum / difference | / | |
| the one-shot proxy, asked to predict where (Spearman) | |||
| in-model, from Magnus | against the measured crossing budget | ||
| learning rate | per-seed | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| pair | ( ep) | ( ep) | sign flips? | ||
| algebra–calculus | |||||
| algebra–geometry | yes | ||||
| algebra–combinatorics | yes | ||||
| calculus–geometry | yes | ||||
| calculus–combinatorics | yes | ||||
| geometry–combinatorics |
| build | arm | against the shifted gold | against the unshifted gold |
|---|---|---|---|
| v1 (algebra pool, epoch) | conflict arms | – | |
| the convention lost to the pretrained prior; measured at the instrument’s floor | |||
| the read-out that followed, unchanged in rule | |||
| v1 | control | ( ) — the arm that should have been inert moved | |
| v1 | conflict | ( ) — the arm that should have moved did not | |
| resolution | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5-7B, clusters | ||||||
| (bits) | ||||||
| (bits) | ||||||
| Qwen3-8B-Base, clusters | ||||||
| (bits) |
| claim | outcome | artefact carrying the threshold | registered | result (verdict file, mtime) | gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| instrument, the positive control | confirmed | slurm_natconflict.sbatch | 65acb7a 08-01 12:52 | natconflict 08-03 08:23 | d 19h |
| v1 batch composition | confirmed | slurm_batchcomp.sbatch , decision rule | 2e5f5a9 08-02 12:42 | batchcomp 08-02 15:32 | h 50m |
| v2 and the ladder | no branch fired | slurm_pathspec.sbatch and PLAN.md : predicts | cd53c09 08-02 16:02 | pathspec 08-03 02:33 | h 30m |
| M1 the mirror | M1 confirmed | slurm_dpd_mirror.sbatch : an asymmetry falsifies the limit-cycle picture | a85c247 08-03 15:32 | dpd_mirror 08-06 07:44 | d 16h |
| C , L the key | C1 , L4 confirmed | slurm_disambig.sbatch , C on the switch and L on the level | 4830e37 08-04 06:46 | disambig 08-04 10:49 | h 03m |
| T1 the mixture ratio | T1 confirmed | slurm_ratio2.sbatch , tolerance frozen with the prediction | ff94a95 08-05 06:22 | ratio2 08-05 16:20 | h 58m |
Learning Rate Scheduling
Learning rate scheduling studies how to vary optimizer step sizes during training to improve stability, convergence, efficiency, and generalization.
See all 59 papers