Background documents behind the paper Penalize the Path, Reward the Outcome. These are the working research record — design rationale, hypotheses, and findings accumulated during the project. The paper is the authoritative writeup; these give the story behind it.
| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| RESEARCH_PLAN.md | Framing, hypotheses, the two-channel credit design, and the pilot revisions. Start here. |
| FINDINGS.md | The detailed running log of experimental results and the mechanisms behind them. |
| SELFCRITIC.md | Ablation: when an intrinsic LLM self-critique can (and cannot) replace verifiable rules. |
| PHASE_DIAGRAM_DESIGN.md | Design of the phase diagram for when dense process rewards help. |
| PROSPECTIVE_PREDICTION.md | Does the variance criterion predict a held-out domain before training? |
| BENCHMARK_ALTERNATIVES.md | Survey and decision on easier agentic benchmarks. |
| PAPER_PLAN.md | Historical planning notes for the paper campaign. |
| PROGRESS.md | Historical research scorecard / progress log. |
| FINAL_SUMMARY.md | Historical summary of the bulletproofing program. |
Some scripts and figure generators reference these files by name in their
comments; the files now live here under docs/.