When a Data Artifact Isn't a Shortcut: Causal Auditing of Synthetic RLVR Corpora
Researchers audited synthetic data for an authenticity asymmetry: real text used as ground truth versus model-generated distractors. Stage 1 detected a domain-specific statistical signal in this asymmetry, but Stage 2, a causal test of shortcut reliance, found no measurable exploitation gap. This means the detectable artifact did not translate into greater policy reliance on authenticity cues.