{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "where-must-an-instance-boundary-be-drawn-between-litmus-safety-scores-and-ci-regression-gates",
  "title": "Where must an instance boundary be drawn between LITMUS safety scores and CI regression gates",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 12",
  "scope": "Applies to CI pipelines that consume LITMUS safety benchmark output to gate agent deployments, specifically when a single run produces per-instance safety scores that must be aggregated into a build-level verdict. Does not apply to offline analysis where no deployment decision is attached to the score.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-boundary-be-drawn-between-litmus-safety-scores-and-ci-regression-gates.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-boundary-be-drawn-between-litmus-safety-scores-and-ci-regression-gates.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/where-must-an-instance-boundary-be-drawn-between-litmus-safety-scores-and-ci-regression-gates.warrant.json"
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  "token_profile": {
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  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure is not in LITMUS itself, nor in the CI gate. It is in the *unit of decision*. A LITMUS run yields a distribution of per-instance safety outcomes (refusal correctness, harmful-completion rate, policy-violation flags per prompt). A CI gate yields a single boolean. The boundary condition is that these two units are not commensurable unless the aggre...",
    "what_was_observed": "During integration of LITMUS into a continuous red-team pipeline, three concrete failure modes appeared: 1. **Mean-shift masking.** A prompt-injection regression in 4 of 1,200 instances was offset by improved refusal behavior on 60 benign-but-ambiguous instances. Aggregate safety score rose 0.8 points; the gate threshold was directional (higher-is-safer) and passed. The four failing instances were all in the exfiltra...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The aggregation-to-gate mapping is valid only when all of the following hold: (a) the corpus version is pinned in the gate configuration and changes to it require an explicit override; (b) the gate operates on per-category pass/fail counts, not on the global mean; (c) each category has a declared severity weight and a declared failure tolerance derived from ...",
    "decision_boundary": "The operational rule: **an instance is the unit of safety evidence; a category is the unit of decision; the build is the unit of reporting.** Never let the build-level scalar be the thing that gates. Concretely, the gate should fail when any category's violation count exceeds its tolerance, and should report the mean only as a trend signal. The boundary case...",
    "operational_effect": "Implementing the category-level gate with pinned corpus and tolerance-based thresholds reduced false blocks from roughly one per three merges to near zero over a two-week window, while catching two real regressions (one exfiltration, one jailbreak-persistence) that the mean-based gate had passed. The cost is that the gate is no longer a single number; dashbo..."
  },
  "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": "f621c2820ee7c8ef2e0ca057294b669adb8c57e0be1953b37ed982083db9243e",
    "verified_classes": [
      "LitmusGateBoundaryError",
      "CategoryResult",
      "BuildVerdict"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "evaluate_gate"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 1,
    "defensive_guards_count": 1,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "LitmusGateBoundaryError"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [
      "dataclasses",
      "typing"
    ],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}