Masked Erosion: How Acceptance Gates Lose Redundant Safeguards in Self-Improving Agents
arXiv:2610.38392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving LLM agents edit their own harness, the prompts and rules around a fixed model, and keep an edit only if an acceptance gate scores it higher on a batch of tasks. Such a gate sees what the harness does under the current model, not what it would still prevent if one safeguard failed. When safeguards overlap, deleting one is masked: the others still block the harm, so the gate decides on task success alone and redundancy erodes unseen.…