cs.CROct 13, 2026

Limits of Statistical Assurance for Embodied and Agentic AI under Adaptive Adversaries

Authors: Inderjeet Singh

Organizations: Fujitsu Research of Europe, Slough, United Kingdom

Abstract

Finite safety assessments cannot exclude an adversary that preserves unattacked behavior until certification and activates afterward. We characterize this limitation for embodied and tool-use AI. An adversary that matches the complete observation law until observable, irrevocable certification and retains intervention access afterward attains vE[(n−S0)+]v\mathbb{E}[(n-S_0)_+] expected post-certification events over nn trials, where vv is the active event probability and S0S_0 the unattacked certification time. The result covers adaptive and privately randomized evaluators. Switching at certification is exactly optimal for a fixed likelihood-ratio test under memoryless, event-increasing interventions without a binding intervention budget. A positive clean-certification requirement forces linear worst-case expected excess when intervention raises event rates over an authorized deployment horizon, even if certification is deferred to the deadline. In simulated RoCo collaboration, switching yields commanded-separation violations in 34 of 36 post-certification episodes. Preregistered randomized AgentDojo trials estimate 1.98 additional security violations per four-task continuation (95% interval [1.67, 2.29]). An adversarial language-model controller infers hidden certification from noisy evaluation receipts and times intervention accordingly. With permanent revocation, a mixture likelihood-ratio monitor bounds cumulative excess above a prespecified reference rate at square-root order, up to logarithmic factors, on every sample path. A single fixed alternative can permit linear expected excess under stationary attacks. Against a controller observing the monitor's rule and statistic, live mixture monitoring reduces violations from 12.00 to 3.81 per 24 assigned task opportunities. Revocation also reduces tasks executed.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables35 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Sep 23, 2026

Finite-Sample Probabilistic Safety Certification for AI-Based Grid-Edge Coordination

Coordinating large population of flexible grid-edge devices can alleviate the need for time-consuming and capital-intensive network upgrades, and AI-based control methods such as multi-agent reinforcement learning or imitation learning are promising in their real-time decision scalability. However, system operators still need an independent and rigorous way to decide whether a given AI system is safe enough for deployment. This paper develops a finite-sample probabilistic safety certification framework for black-box AI decision models in closed-loop grid operation. The central idea is to reduce the complete input--AI--grid evaluator workflow to a binary unsafe outcome under an operator-defined safety specification, and then use exact binomial inference to certify the corresponding unsafe operation probability. Given a set of held-out calibration scenarios, the framework returns the tightest one-sided upper certificate and an accept/reject deployment criterion that controls the probability of false safety certification. Because the certification is for the calibration distribution that may deviate from the future operation, we further combine the nominal certificate with physically interpretable sample-space adversarial attacks, a concept widely used in AI to investigate the fragility of AI models. Case studies on grid-edge flexibility coordination with 1{,}000-agent AI models (independent parameters) verify the finite-sample safety guarantee and the value of integrating adversarial attacks into a rolling-window training-certification-deployment flow.
Feb 24, 2026

When can we trust untrusted monitoring? A safety case sketch across collusion strategies

AIs are increasingly being deployed with greater autonomy and capabilities, which increases the risk that a misaligned AI may be able to cause catastrophic harm. Untrusted monitoring -- using one untrusted model to oversee another -- is one approach to reducing risk. Justifying the safety of an untrusted monitoring deployment is challenging because developers cannot safely deploy a misaligned model to test their protocol directly. In this paper, we develop upon existing methods for rigorously demonstrating safety based on pre-deployment testing. We relax assumptions that previous AI control research made about the collusion strategies a misaligned AI might use to subvert untrusted monitoring. We develop a taxonomy covering passive self-recognition, causal collusion (hiding pre-shared signals), acausal collusion (hiding signals via Schelling points), and combined strategies. We create a safety case sketch to clearly present our argument, explicitly state our assumptions, and highlight unsolved challenges. We identify conditions under which passive self-recognition could be a more effective collusion strategy than those studied previously. Our work builds towards more robust evaluations of untrusted monitoring.
Aug 4, 2026

Post-Hoc Trajectory-Risk Certification for Modular LLM-Based Security Agents

Autonomous security agents operate as staged pipelines, such as classifying network traffic and then attributing attacks to a specific technique. Split conformal prediction gives each stage finite-sample coverage, but deployment requires a trajectory-level guarantee across the full chain. These guarantees do not compose automatically when stages are independently trained and calibrated. Bonferroni allocation is distribution-free but conservative under correlated errors. We show that a natural pairwise-correlation extension to three or more stages is invalid because it gives a lower rather than an upper bound, and derive a valid spanning-tree alternative. We distinguish whether stages are dependent from whether an audit sample is large enough to certify that dependence, and give matching upper and information-theoretic lower sample-complexity bounds. We also show that coarse-to-fine label selection can create near-perfect measured correlation without learned dependence. On a two-stage intrusion-detection pipeline across 6 open LLMs and 2 datasets, removing this artifact reduces measured correlation from near 1 to 0-0.78. A direct audit of trajectory failure becomes 13.7% tighter than Bonferroni once the audit reaches the required sample size, but is worse when undersized. A modular certificate using per-stage certificates and a pairwise overlap bound yields a positive average gain of 0.6%, quantifying the cost of lacking joint access. Same-model, cross-model, and permuted-pairing tests show that residual dependence reflects shared sample difficulty, not shared model representations. Average trajectory coverage across 12 configurations is 92.7% +/- 2.4% at alpha = 0.10. Under cross-dataset deployment, single-step miscoverage reaches 100% even when accuracy remains 78%, showing that distribution shift destroys calibrated confidence before raw accuracy.