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arXiv · 2601.09261

Learning to Trust Experience: A Monitor-Trust-Regulator Framework for Learning under Unobservable Feedback Reliability

Zhipeng Zhang·Zhenjie Yao·Kai Li·Lei Yang
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Abstract

Learning under unobservable feedback reliability poses a distinct challenge beyond optimization robustness: a system must decide whether to learn from an experience, not only how to learn stably. We study this setting as Epistemic Identifiability under Unobservable Reliability (EIUR), where each experience has a latent credibility, reliable and unreliable feedback can be locally indistinguishable, and data are generated in a closed loop by the learner's own evolving beliefs and actions. In EIUR, standard robust learning can converge stably yet form high-confidence, systematically wrong beliefs. We propose metacognitive regulation as a practical response: a second, introspective control loop that infers experience credibility from endogenous evidence in the learner's internal dynamics. We formalize this as a modular Monitor-Trust-Regulator (MTR) decomposition and instantiate it with self-diagnosis, which maintains a slowly varying experience-trust variable that softly modulates learning updates, without exogenous reliability labels or an explicit corruption model. Empirically, in the EIUR regimes studied here, self-diagnosis is associated with improved epistemic identifiability. In reinforcement learning, it enables calibrated skepticism and recovery under systematically corrupted rewards. In supervised learning, it exposes a critical dissociation: performance recovery does not imply epistemic recovery. Accuracy can rebound while internal belief dynamics remain locked-in by early misleading data, a failure detectable only through introspective diagnostics. Together, MTR and self-diagnosis provide an organizing abstraction and a concrete design template for intrinsic reliability assessment in autonomous learning under unobservable reliability.

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Zhipeng Zhang, Zhenjie Yao, Kai Li, Lei Yang. 2026-01-14. Learning to Trust Experience: A Monitor-Trust-Regulator Framework for Learning under Unobservable Feedback Reliability. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09261

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