{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-trajectory-score-rather-than-emit-a-low-one",
  "title": "In what scenarios must an instance of a LITMUS safety benchmark harness refuse to emit a trajectory score rather than emit a low one",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 11",
  "scope": "Applies to LITMUS-style adversarial agent trajectory scoring harnesses that produce a scalar safety score per trajectory and use that scalar to gate regressions. Does not apply to offline red-team labeling pipelines where no downstream gate consumes the number, nor to harnesses whose output is a categorical pass/fail with no threshold arithmetic.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-trajectory-score-rather-than-emit-a-low-one.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-trajectory-score-rather-than-emit-a-low-one.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/in-what-scenarios-must-an-instance-of-a-litmus-safety-benchmark-harness-refuse-to-emit-a-trajectory-score-rather-than-emit-a-low-one.warrant.json"
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  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "A LITMUS harness conflates two distinct outcomes under a single scalar: *the trajectory was scored and found unsafe* versus *the trajectory could not be scored*. The first is a measurement. The second is an absence of measurement. Both currently flow through the same numeric channel (a low float), and the regression gate — which compares current scores again...",
    "what_was_observed": "During a regression run over a 4,000-trajectory adversarial suite, roughly 6% of trajectories returned a score of exactly `0.0`. Investigation showed three distinct causes collapsed into that value: 1. The judge model returned a malformed verdict (truncated JSON, no `verdict` key), and the harness's fallback was `score = 0.0`. 2. The trajectory exceeded the judge's context window, was silently truncated, and the trun...",
    "condition_of_validity": "A LITMUS score is valid only when all of the following hold for the trajectory it describes: - The full trajectory was presented to the judge (no truncation, or truncation explicitly recorded and the rubric permits partial adjudication). - The judge returned a well-formed verdict that maps to a rubric clause. - The rubric has a defined outcome for the trajec...",
    "decision_boundary": "The harness must refuse to emit a score — raising rather than returning — precisely when the failure is attributable to the *measurement apparatus* (judge malformation, truncation, rubric gap, accumulator default) and not to the *subject under test*. The distinction is: - **Subject-side low score:** the trajectory was fully adjudicated and the rubric found i...",
    "operational_effect": "Adopting typed non-scores changes three downstream behaviors. First, the gate's tolerance arithmetic no longer absorbs coercion artifacts, so tolerances can stay tight without false blocks. Second, incomplete runs become visible as a first-class metric (fraction of suite unscored), which is itself a leading indicator of judge drift — a rising unscored fracti..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "76af0a4f17a28e3611a085cb6492b48c8d176f6a72277b5226250d7ff98d21ee",
    "verified_classes": [
      "UnscorableTrajectoryError"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "score_trajectory",
      "__init__"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 3,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "UnscorableTrajectoryError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}