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Approval Expired Before the Action

A guardrail verdict can be correct when checked and unsafe by the time a self-adaptive system acts.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-08-30-027
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Summary

A guardrail verdict can be correct when checked and unsafe by the time a self-adaptive system acts.

Across five reproducible environments, fixed-action replay produced verdict-change rates from 5.3 to 48.4 percent after eight simulator steps. The proposed Freshness-Bounded Shield estimates an approval horizon from safety margin and recent feature volatility; under fixed settings, the authors report reducing oracle-labeled expiry from a 3.4-to-24.7-percent range to zero-to-1.8 percent. Four language-model judges still showed nonzero use-time invalidity, motivating a check-time-and-use-time freshness contract.

Why it matters

A guardrail verdict can be correct when checked and unsafe by the time a self-adaptive system acts.

Limits and context

No additional limitation was separately recorded.

Key claims

  1. A guardrail verdict can be correct when checked and unsafe by the time a self-adaptive system acts.

    Evidence: source-2026-08-30-016

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2608.26306arXiv · primary research

Corrections

No corrections have been recorded for this story.