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A Good Answer Could Still Skip the Required Check

ContractEval maps query-active procedural obligations to trace evidence and separates omissions, wrong branches and invariant breaches.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-09-10-007
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Summary

ContractEval maps query-active procedural obligations to trace evidence and separates omissions, wrong branches and invariant breaches.

Output-only scoring can approve an answer even when the agent skipped the branch, check or dependency that justified it. ContractEval turns a procedure into obligations activated by the current query, then matches those obligations against a response or execution trace. Under gold expected and observed graphs, it localized every injected structural failure in a controlled audit suite; language-model extraction retained much of the signal but remained sensitive to calibration. The authors explicitly frame the method as an audit aid, not a compliance guarantee.

Why it matters

ContractEval maps query-active procedural obligations to trace evidence and separates omissions, wrong branches and invariant breaches.

Limits and context

  • Output-only scoring can approve an answer even when the agent skipped the branch, check or dependency that justified it.
  • The authors explicitly frame the method as an audit aid, not a compliance guarantee.

Key claims

  1. ContractEval maps query-active procedural obligations to trace evidence and separates omissions, wrong branches and invariant breaches.

    Qualification: Output-only scoring can approve an answer even when the agent skipped the branch, check or dependency that justified it.

    Evidence: source-2026-09-10-007

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2609.09458arXiv · primary research

Corrections

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