ERM Fixes Causal Rung Collapse in LLMs
New research identifies 'rung collapse' in LLMs, where models confuse associations with causal interventions, leading to flawed reasoning under distributional shifts. It proposes Epistemic Regret Minimization (ERM), a belief revision method that penalizes causal errors independently of task success. Experiments across six frontier LLMs show ERM recovers 53-59% of entrenched errors.