Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $\sigma$-Weighted Post-Training

Abstract

Hybrid post-training often mixes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), using training-side signals to set each sample's balance. Such signals characterize the anchor data and policy, but not whether the emphasized behavior helps in the target task and evaluation setting. This mismatch can reactivate and amplify pretrained behavior even after its literal form is removed from supervision. We demonstrate this with DIAA (Dual-Implicit Adversarial Amplification), a per-sample $\sigma$-weighted SFT/RL hybrid. With all literal Python fences removed from its anchor, DIAA emits unexecuted Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) on $29%$ of MATH-500 prompts, three times vanilla GRPO. Paired interventions show $10.6$ percentage points of accuracy recovery when TIR is suppressed and comparable contributions from SFT imitation and $\sigma$-amplification; a student trained on a $0%$-TIR teacher anchor emits it at $45.8%$. Intervention-Certified Amplification (ICA) gates $\sigma$ with paired-rollout target evidence. Frozen and online ICA reduce TIR to $13.8%$ and $11.2%$, halve residual drag, improve accuracy from $47.5%$ to $48.7%$ and $49.3%$, and transfer to held-out GSM8K without retuning.