Phenomenal framing of the provenance gap in alignment research. The replay/precomputation angle is something I've been wrestling with in production systems where we can't just inspect internals and call it validated. The cryptographic commitment piece reminds me alot of how we handle state transitions in distributed consensus, where temporal ordering becomes the only reliable anchor. I'm curious how ACV scales when dealing with multi-agent scenarios where the verification challenge itself could be adverserialy gamed.
That’s a really good point, and I think you’re exactly right about temporal ordering being the real anchor. ACV is deliberately closer to a consensus primitive than to an “inspection” mechanism—once internals are opaque, provenance is the only invariant left that survives adversarial optimization.
One clarification: the current ACV construction is intentionally single-agent and single-kernel. It proves a narrow negative result—namely that replay and post-hoc rationalization collapse under anchored commitments—before taking on compositional settings.
In multi-agent scenarios the verification problem itself does become gameable, unless additional structure is imposed. The direction we’re exploring is to treat verification as a consensus-like process over commitments, where each agent’s anchor constrains not just its own action trace, but the space of mutually consistent traces across agents. At that point, the attack surface shifts from “fake explanations” to coalitional degeneracy, which is a different failure mode.
In other words: ACV scales only if the verification layer is promoted to a first-class coordination protocol, not as a passive auditor. That boundary—between provenance guarantees and adversarial coordination—is exactly where the next work sits.
Phenomenal framing of the provenance gap in alignment research. The replay/precomputation angle is something I've been wrestling with in production systems where we can't just inspect internals and call it validated. The cryptographic commitment piece reminds me alot of how we handle state transitions in distributed consensus, where temporal ordering becomes the only reliable anchor. I'm curious how ACV scales when dealing with multi-agent scenarios where the verification challenge itself could be adverserialy gamed.
That’s a really good point, and I think you’re exactly right about temporal ordering being the real anchor. ACV is deliberately closer to a consensus primitive than to an “inspection” mechanism—once internals are opaque, provenance is the only invariant left that survives adversarial optimization.
One clarification: the current ACV construction is intentionally single-agent and single-kernel. It proves a narrow negative result—namely that replay and post-hoc rationalization collapse under anchored commitments—before taking on compositional settings.
In multi-agent scenarios the verification problem itself does become gameable, unless additional structure is imposed. The direction we’re exploring is to treat verification as a consensus-like process over commitments, where each agent’s anchor constrains not just its own action trace, but the space of mutually consistent traces across agents. At that point, the attack surface shifts from “fake explanations” to coalitional degeneracy, which is a different failure mode.
In other words: ACV scales only if the verification layer is promoted to a first-class coordination protocol, not as a passive auditor. That boundary—between provenance guarantees and adversarial coordination—is exactly where the next work sits.