Advanced Reinforcement Learning Interview Questions, issue 17, Feb 12, 2026
The Transitivity Assumption Trap
Senior Engineer interview at OpenAI, and the interviewer asks:
“How do you clean this data before training your Reward Model?”
Deleting intransitive preference loops destroys the uncertainty structure your Bradley–Terry reward model needs to encode, forcing false certainty into the policy.
The full answer, with the mechanism and the arithmetic, is for paid subscribers on Substack.