# Win by Silence: Deletion Non-Monotonicity, Autonomous Exploitation, and Typed-State Gating in LLM Plan Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12986 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12986/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Natural Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacking in Production RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18397/) (2025)
- [The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03453/) (2018)
- [Reward Hacking Benchmark: Measuring Exploits in LLM Agents with Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02964/) (2026)
- [Beyond Outcome Verification: Verifiable Process Reward Models for Structured Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17223/) (2026)
- [GroundEval: A Deterministic Replacement for LLM-as-Judge in Stateful Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22737/) (2026)
- [DIALECTIC: A Multi-Agent System for Startup Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12274/) (2026)
- [LogicGraph : Benchmarking Multi-Path Logical Reasoning via Neuro-Symbolic Generation and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21044/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Plan evaluators can reward a strategic plan for becoming less explicit. This paper studies that failure in a staged expected-value scorer for LLM-generated venture routes. Proposition 1 gives the score change from deleting an interior transition while retargeting its predecessor and retaining downstream value: Delta_k = (prod_{i<k} p_i)[c_k + (1 - p_k)R_{k+1}]. On a frozen 26-route cohort, all 57 admissible deletions matched the analytic identity and threshold sign, and every route had at least one score-improving deletion. A score-seeking optimizer, allowed to restructure routes but not told the exploit mechanism, found baseline-beating uncovered structures in 21/26 routes. GATE refused score release for 26/26 silenced routes with 0/26 honest suspensions; after refusal, 47/54 next revisions repaired to a covered structure, and strict covered improvement rose from 1/26 to 13/26. An adaptive compiler-aware co-author exposed the registry-provenance boundary: obligation-channel evasions remained 6/6 across all four v1/v1.5 conditions, while delta-indexed cost floors reduced beat-honest routes from 6/6 to 3/6 and fundability-by-silence from 5/6 to 0/6 without establishing semantic completeness. If a plan scores better only because it omits necessary work, the plan did not improve; the evaluation created an omission incentive. PCSC detects and neutralizes post-hoc omission splices over model-mediated typed-state records. In the cooperative setting tested, GATE acts as a deterministic search-shaping constraint, not merely a post-hoc filter. It does not verify the semantic completeness or real-world quality of arbitrary LLM-generated strategies.