NormWorlds-CF: Solver-Verified Counterfactual Normative Reasoning with Metamorphic-Relation GRPO

Abstract

Language models can reach the right normative verdict for the wrong reason. We introduce NormWorlds-CF, a solver-verified environment for counterfactual normative reasoning in executable rule worlds. Its deterministic solver produces final answers, proof and falsification certificates, argument statuses, support sets, and paired-world change labels, enabling supervision and evaluation without LLM judges. The benchmark contains staged SFT diagnostics and a compact paired-world task with 270 root families and 1080 canonical-to-variant pairs. The SFT diagnostics show that final-answer supervision can saturate verdict accuracy without inducing falsification competence: answer-only SFT reaches perfect answer accuracy but scores zero on joint falsification certificates, while full-mix training with targeted replay reaches strong all-task accuracy (0.99). For the structured-change task, we introduce metamorphic-relation GRPO (MR-GRPO), a class-conditioned reward for GRPO that gives partial credit for relation families and solver-visible change fields. In matched Qwen3-1.7B continuation experiments, MR-GRPO improves held-out relation accuracy and relation-family correctness, and reduces wrong-family error, compared to sparse and answer-only GRPO. In Qwen3-4B three-seed validation, sparse reward preserves coarse relation labels best, answer-only reward improves answer-change but weakens relation-family structure, and MR-GRPO leads on answer-, support-, and status-change fields as well as class-conditioned MR and change-presence. These results show that verified counterfactual structure can shape post-training beyond final answers, while exact full change-record generation, invariant subtype recognition, and out-of-distribution (OOD) transfer remain open problems.