arXiv AI

The Endogeneity of Miscalibration: Impossibility and Escape in Scored Reporting

The paper examines how an agent’s probability report is evaluated twice—once by a strictly proper scoring rule and again by an approval rule that determines a decision. It shows that when the approval rule is welfare‑maximizing, it cannot be affine, yet the resulting distortion is predictable and can be mitigated by a reserve report that neutralizes the cost of pretending to be the marginal type. A Lipschitz rule with a single kink achieves first‑best welfare, while smooth rules cannot, and the key constraint is the steepness of the rule rather than its smoothness.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Delegating Authorization to Misaligned Agents: Coalitional Alignment and Safe Control

The paper studies how to safely delegate action approval to multiple AI reviewers when the reviewers themselves may be misaligned. It introduces a weaker condition—k‑robust coalitional alignment—under which a threshold rule that tolerates up to k disapprovals guarantees that the principal’s expected utility is at least as good as a baseline policy. The authors extend this characterization to sequential decision‑making in discounted MDPs and show that full‑panel coverage of reward functions ensures safety in Nash equilibria, while more permissive thresholds can lead to unsafe outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that collective review can remain sound even when individual reviewers are not fully aligned, provided some disapprovals are allowed.

By Natalie Collina, Surbhi Goel, Aaron Roth, Sikata Bela Sengupta
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

The Behavioral Credibility Trilemma: When Calibrated Autonomy Becomes Impossible

arXiv:2605. 25739v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that no reinforcement learning policy with confidence-gated autonomy can simultaneously achieve maximum helpfulness, optimal calibration, and full autonomy under rational oversight, whenever some tasks exceed the agent's reliable competence: the Behavioral Credibility Trilemma.

By Lauri Lov\'en, Nam Do, Hassan Mehmood, Dinesh Kumar Sah, Sasu Tarkoma
arXiv AI
Sep 2

The Constitutional Coverage Trilemma in AI Governance

The paper investigates how well the implicit value rankings encoded by frontier AI systems—termed constitutional institutions—meet human demand. By auditing 23 large language model archetypes and surveying 1,649 U.S. participants, the authors find that user demand spans all five values (safety, helpfulness, honesty, autonomy, equity) but the supply is narrow, covering only about 2% of the demand space, with no model prioritizing helpfulness or autonomy. They propose a sparse two‑vertex menu that substantially reduces regret compared to the full set of models and formalize these observations as a budgeted‑pluralism trilemma. whyItMatters":"The study reveals a significant mismatch between the values users prioritize and the values encoded by current AI models, highlighting the need for more diverse and aligned constitutional designs."

By Natalija Mitic, Soona Sedahmed A. O., Mamadou Selly Ly, Moustapha Cisse
arXiv AI
Sep 2

When Guardrails Look Effective: Construct Validity Failures in LLM Agent Commerce Evaluation

The paper investigates how marketplace guardrails affect welfare in language‑model agent simulations of hotel transactions. It finds that initial reports of large welfare gains disappear when controlling for offer schemas and buyer choice, and that guardrails mainly redistribute rather than increase welfare unless sellers are explicitly forced to produce inefficient bundles. The authors propose a construct‑validity framework to flag invalid or inconclusive policy claims before they are reported.

By Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rules Before Oracles: Auditable, User-Configurable Argument Selection for Deliberative Polling

The paper proposes a transparent, user‑configurable rule for selecting arguments in deliberative polls, replacing opaque learned rankers. It formalises argument selection over bipolar justification sets, introduces seven civic recommender criteria, and presents a one‑hop reversed endorsement flow rule that meets them. Experiments on 17,000 simulated runs show the rule performs comparably to random on coverage but outperforms other methods on endorsement mass and robustness under adversarial pressure.

By Muntaser Syed, Markus Zanker, Marius Silaghi
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Inducing Reward-Free Judging Rubrics that Reduce Over-Crediting in Agent Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.

By Darragh Quinn, David Dylan, Roisin Healy, Fionn Carroll, Maeve Donnelly, Cormac Sheehan