arXiv AI

When Can a Machine Trust a Statute? A Survival Certificate for Machine-Extracted Legal Logic

The paper investigates the reliability of machine‑parsed statutes by developing a passive survival certificate for the Duquenne‑Guigues implication basis of extracted legal contexts. It measures inter‑extractor disagreement, runs 1,000 Monte‑Carlo trials, and certifies an implication only when a one‑sided Wilson 95% lower bound on survival reaches 0.95, providing premise spans and minimal counterexamples. Applied to 29,365 Missouri sections and 502 Indian central‑Act sections, the method passes a held‑out gate for many statute families, yet a global error model shows that 93.2% of held‑out chapters fall below the informativeness floor, attributing this to calibration‑rate transfer rather than selection bias.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

A distribution-free certification framework for trustworthy crash-severity prediction

The paper introduces a distribution‑free certification layer that can be applied to any crash‑severity prediction model without modifying the model itself. It provides guarantees for ordinal outcomes, per‑class validity, transfer of coverage to unobserved severities, and one‑sided certificates under deployment shift, all grounded in a functional of the true data law. The framework is evaluated on 5.2 million Texas records, demonstrating a model‑independent lower bound on set width for vulnerable road users and is released as an open‑source package with theorem‑level tests.

By Amir Rafe, Subasish Das
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Calibrating Criterion Revision in LLM Agents: Failure Modes and a Trace-Anchored Protocol

The paper introduces a framework for evaluating how large language model agents revise their success criteria after failures, defining five non‑compensatory conditions that must be met for a criterion revision to be considered valid. Using the CMB‑0.1 protocol, the authors test twelve cross‑domain scenarios across four system configurations, finding that no model trial satisfies all five conditions and highlighting specific failure modes such as zero‑state reconstruction and inadequate intervention sensitivity. They propose a more stringent trace‑anchored CMB‑0.4 protocol to better isolate and measure criterion revision in future studies.

By Guodong Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 3

ClaimReceipt: Verifying Evidence Sufficiency and Coverage in Agent Evaluations

The paper introduces ClaimReceipt, a specification and verifier that checks whether a claim in an agent evaluation can be recomputed from retained evidence (sufficiency) and whether the evidence covers the entire experiment set (coverage). Using the CR‑2 verifier on 1,392 historical records, the authors demonstrate accurate reproduction of audit verdicts, non‑redundant field groups, and zero false positives on semantic faults. In a prospective CR‑3 run, the system correctly flags missing receipts and preserves coverage when private evidence is withheld, while adding minimal overhead to inference time and transaction size.

By Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang