Bistable by Construction: Wall-Clock-Calibrated State Monitors Have No Moment-Detection Regime at Agent Cadence
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Abstract (arXiv)
Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt<=1s a constant alarm (20/20; median 18 firings); at dt>=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. A scriptable gpt-5.4-mini agent loop measures latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s), inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 5 of its 11 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.
Builds on
5 of 11 references.
References · 5
- 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agentscited by 437
- 2025AgentSpec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement for Safe and Reliable LLM Agentscited by 223
- 2022The 'Problem' of Human Label Variation: On Ground Truth in Data, Modeling and Evaluationcited by 139
- 2025ProbGuard: Proactive Runtime Monitoring for LLM Agent Safety via Probabilistic Predictioncited by 28
- 2026The Saturation Trap and the Subjectivity of Intervention Timing: Why Affect-Based Triggers and LLM Judges Fail to Time Interventions on Autonomous Agentscited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.
1 paper.