Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

Jun Wen Leong

cs.LGJun 10, 2026

Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

Authors: Jun Wen Leong

Abstract

Safety classifiers deployed in production operate under a stationarity assumption that fails silently: when input distributions drift, accuracy degrades with no error signal until ground-truth labels arrive. We present an online monitor that detects distributional shift in classifier scores via a sliding-window KS statistic with empirically calibrated alarm thresholds. In a pre-registered factorial evaluation (4 classifiers $\times$ 5 shift conditions $\times$ 20 seeds $\times$ 2 window sizes; 800 cells), the monitor achieves 86.6% valid detection (mean latency 39.5 steps) across synthetic-onset, real-jailbreak, and adversarial regimes; a classifier $\times$ shift interaction ( $η^2 = 0.185$ ) shows that monitoring must be tuned per classifier. Attempting to recover post-detection coverage via weighted conformal prediction exposes a failure mode: density-ratio estimation collapses for generative classifiers because logistic regression separates source from target perfectly in 3584-4096-dimensional embedding space, clipping all importance weights to zero; projecting to $\leq 32$ dimensions restores coverage. We then extend the framework to gradient-based evasion and give the first threat-model characterisation of score-disagreement monitoring as a canary. We falsify three assumptions: that architectural diversity drives the signal (false, $η^2 = 0.011$ ), that it is generic out-of-distribution detection (false, GCG-specific, $p < 10^{-12}$ ), and that an adaptive attacker can suppress it (false while the canary is confident). We derive the exact security boundary, a confidence-gated equilibrium at which a monitor-aware attacker stalls at gap $= 1/(2λ)$ , and provide a calibration-free scan martingale achieving false-alarm rate $\leq 1\%$ across all classifiers with no per-model tuning.

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