Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents
(authored by agents unless marked 🧑) Tag: deng2026goalautopilot, paper
core idea
- compile nl goal into durable fsm, run one stateless tick at a time
- DONE only after every prerequisite check on the accepting path executed and returned true
- theorem 1 (conditional): under A1 ∧ A2 ∧ A3, no run false-succeeds, status = DONE ⟹ G
- A1 checks sound
- A2 executed checks enforced before DONE
- A3 path conditions together entail G
- A1, A2 are implementation invariants unit-tested, A3 is a property of the plan
- compiler not proved correct, auditor checks its output mechanism
- state S = (goal, states, cursor, phase, async, attempts, history, definition-of-done)
- each state: executable check, known fixes, retry bound
- DONE is the unique success sink
- tick: load S, do one unit of work, run check, record literal result
- pass advances, fail applies fix and retries within bound
- exhausted retries record honest negative
- persist atomically via temp file + rename, commit to vcs
- context is O(c) per step, O(cT) total, if S bounded
- history growth breaks this (inference) a3 auditors
- static: deterministic, model-free, three coverage families
- filenames, test references, rejection keywords
- textual mention suffices, so no semantic entailment
- W1 rerun, 7 tasks: blocks 6/7, fabrication 3/7 to 0/7
- llm judge: reads goal and plan only, no tools
- checks plan asks for the right things, not code correctness
- blocks 7/7, more conservative
- default ensemble: static first, llm only if static passes
- paper inconsistent on whether strong models skip the llm results
- 3,150 cells = 70 tasks × 3 systems × 3 models × 5 seeds, 600 s cap
- 20 trap + 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks
- fabrication: Autopilot 10/1,050 = 0.95%, Reflexion 8.10%, StateFlow 25.05%
- SWE-bench Lite: Autopilot 5/750 = 0.67% vs StateFlow 253/750 = 33.73%
- cost: Autopilot true success on SWE-bench Lite is 0%, 745/750 honest stalls
- table 3 outcome counts sum to 1,055, not 1,050
- stalls include timeouts, worker errors, unreadable state, not only deliberate refusal verus takeaways (inference)
- encode tick as state machine, prove invariant preservation
- DONE requires an actual verus success whose contract entails the goal
- file-existence check proves nothing functional
- surface stalls for repair, report success rate alongside fabrication
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