cs.LGSep 7, 2026

The Oversight Gap: What LLM Safety Monitors Miss, and Why It Is Not Capability

Authors: Xin Xu

Organizations: Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

Several properties safety monitors are asked to certify, among them cross-tenant noninterference, sandbagging and evaluation awareness, are 2-safety hyperproperties, witnessed only by two executions. The standard consequence is a binary impossibility: one trace cannot decide them. We replace the binary with a measurement. A tight bound puts the balanced accuracy of any single-trace monitor at 12+12TV(P0,P1)\tfrac12+\tfrac12\,TV(P_0,P_1), turning undecidability into a graded detectability frontier and defining an oversight gap: a monitor's shortfall below it. On a leak family with closed-form TVTV, nine LLM monitors are optimal at TV=0TV=0 but capture little signal as TVTV grows; at TV=1TV=1, where a 20-line membership check scores 100%100\%, they average 60.9%60.9\%. That shortfall is mostly not capability: naming what to check closes 61%61\% of it while leaving the TV=0TV=0 control at chance. The same split runs through a 2×22{\times}2 factorial: an imagined second run leaves monitors at chance (50.4%50.4\%) while the same rule on an executed second run reaches 90.0%90.0\%, and a stored oracle without a comparison procedure yields only 68.2%68.2\%. Information and procedure are each necessary and neither is capability. Under nondeterminism, replay tracks a closed-form kk-replay curve only under the right projection, and a projection frontier shows the resulting dilemma is forced: narrow misses 98.6%98.6\% of off-channel leaks, broad flags 75.7%75.7\% of clean traffic, and attainable accuracy decays like 1/(qm)1/(qm) in the benign-variation rate and the channel count. Finally, two frontier LLM judges certified an earlier version of our own benchmark as sound while a sign test found a directional bias (p=2.7×105p=2.7\times10^{-5}) that invalidated three of our findings. Construction validity for hyperproperty benchmarks should be proved mechanically, not audited by models.

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