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Cody H. Fleming

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#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Certified Safety Curation: Distribution-Free Guarantees for Safe Offline Reinforcement Learning

Safe offline reinforcement learning assumes a cost function on every transition. We ask what remains possible when safety can be judged only by comparing short clips and occasionally asking whether an episode exceeded its budget. Certified safety curation answers with a filter-then-clone pipeline: a state-only value trained from segment comparisons scores whole trajectories, Learn-then-Test calibration certifies a selection threshold under a distribution-free $(\alpha, \delta)$ bound on the unsafe fraction of the selection, and behavior cloning follows. We are not aware of prior work certifying the composition of a training set for offline RL or imitation. Oracle controls justify the design: reweighting individual transitions fails even with an exact value, so the value selects whole trajectories. The policies satisfy the cost budget on eleven of fifteen DSRL tasks, one short of cloning the ground-truth safe subset, which needs a label on every trajectory; the uncertified variant reaches twelve. Retrained on the certified selection, the strongest full-label method becomes safe where no setting of its own cost target rescues it. Refusal is predictable: the certificate's probability has a closed form in the purity the pool attains, which the calibration sample estimates and the scorer enters only through.

Adam Haroon, Cody H. Fleming · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Who Analyses the Analyser? Self-Validating LLM Hazard Analysis with Constitutional Meta-STPA

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted to draft the artifacts of safety analysis such as, losses, hazards, Unsafe Control Actions (UCAs), and safety constraints, inside rigorous processes such as Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA). Yet a blind spot runs through this fast-growing literature: every system gets analysed except the LLM-assisted tool doing the analysing, which is itself a safety-relevant system that can hallucinate standards, emit unverifiable constraints, and leave no audit trail from prompt to artifact. We take seriously the question the field has skipped -- {who analyses the analyser?} and answer it by turning STPA on the tool itself. We present \{Constitutional Meta-STPA}, an LLM-assisted STPA tool built around a closed loop: the tool runs a {meta-STPA} of the class of AI-assisted safety tools and {derives} rather than asserts, its governance constitution from the resulting loss$\to$hazard$\to$UCA$\to$constraint chain, yielding a published constitution of $21$ Tool Principles and $8$ Meta-Safety Principles, each bound to a code enforcement point. We formalise the measured object as a constitution-marginal coverage operator over a principle set $P$ ($|P|{=}29$) with a soundness lemma that isolates coverage from model and scanner, and report four findings. {(i)~Self-derivation:} a frontier ensemble ({claude-opus-4.8}${+}${claude-sonnet-4}) recovers $18/21$ canonical and all $8/8$ governance principles from the tool's own design, while a weaker pair recovers $12/21$ and $3/8$, so the meta layer is model-limited, not constitution-limited, and the same $8/8$ re-emerge from a second, independently authored tool.

Samuel Tetteh, Udip Shrestha, Joshua R. Waite et al. · 0 citations

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