Credit Without Ground Truth: Claim-Matched Evaluation of Step-Level Credit with Finite Executed Replay
Haiyue Zhang
Step-level credit evaluation can conflate numerical association with ordering and branch recovery with position-selection value. We test these distinctions in ALFWorld with two independently seeded replay banks: 27,520 continuations over 172 fixed turns. At 16 continuations per arm per bank, cross-bank replay-contrast associations are Pearson 0.736 and pooled Spearman 0.330. On 30 historical failures, A-count-selected branches at confidence-/implicit-selected positions gain 8.54 percentage points over same-position factual reruns, but their 3.33-point advantage over frozen-random positions under the same alternative-selection rule remains unresolved. Numerical association alone does not establish reliable pooled ordering; branch recovery alone does not establish better score-informed position selection. Historical judge alignment is modestly positive with an unresolved archived-control increment. Same-cohort C/D information-source comparisons and a short, sparse-exposure training pilot provide scope checks; incremental hindsight training utility remains unestablished. Findings are conditional on the tested policies, intervention support and finite budgets.
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