When Is Reuse Superiority Licensed? Evidence Separation for Heterogeneous Offline Experience Reuse

Comparisons of heterogeneous offline experience reuse often collapse distinct questions into a single statement that one method is “better”: average outcome, target-wise benefit, source-selection quality, and deployed behavior are treated as interchangeable evidence. We study when such comparative claims are warranted. We introduce an executable, claim-specific evidence-separation protocol that first specifies what “better” means—including the estimand, population, reference, measurement contract, comparison budget, uncertainty unit, deployment contract, and scope—and then invokes the evidence required by that claim. In controlled finite-MDP problems with known answers, stronger audit configurations reduce wrong directional claims at matched claimed-decision coverage, while a critic-local forced-reuse score shows weak fine-grained agreement with exact downstream consequences but retains coarse consequence information. The result is a claim- licensing methodology for heterogeneous reuse, not a universal controller or a validated prospective harm predictor.