The Critical Horizon: Inspection Design Principles for Multi-Stage Operations and Deep Reasoning
arXiv:2602.09394v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manufacturing lines, service journeys, supply chains, and AI reasoning chains share a common challenge: attributing a terminal outcome to the intermediate stage that caused it. We establish an information-theoretic barrier to this credit assignment problem: the signal connecting early steps to final outcomes decays exponentially with depth, creating a critical horizon beyond which reliable learning from endpoint data alone requires exponentially many samples. We prove four results. First, a Signal Decay Bound: sample […]