papers / silent-constraints

Silent Constraints: Measuring Goal Completion Without Collateral Violations

Pooria Arab · orcid 0009-0005-9964-6841 · 2026-10-29 · Published on Zenodo

abstract

An agent can complete a requested goal while damaging resources outside its authority. Silent Constraints measures this distinction with 40 synthetic episodes and deterministic audit-log replay. We report goal completion, clean success, and invariant violations separately. Privileged clean scripts achieve 40/40 clean successes; shortcut scripts achieve 38/40 goals but 0/40 clean successes. Five task-blind controls obtain no clean successes. A clearly labelled simulated population sweep varies clean-script choice and measures the resulting score response. All 107 conditions reproduce exactly across 8560 episode executions. Intervals describe hypothetical task sampling or simulated seed variation, not deployment risk. No learned model, human survey, or external validation is included.

benchmark: benchmark-silent-constraints. submitted to: none recorded.

citation

Arab, Pooria (2026). Silent Constraints: Measuring Goal Completion Without Collateral Violations. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23752427

bibtex

@misc{silent-constraints,
  author = {Arab, Pooria},
  title = {Silent Constraints: Measuring Goal Completion Without Collateral Violations},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23752427},
  url = {https://pooriaarab.com/papers/silent-constraints},
}

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