Integrity-Aware Trust Slope Validation

Mechanism

The trust slope is the time derivative of an integrity envelope maintained as a canonical field within the agent's cognitive state. Each evaluation cycle, the integrity primitive ingests three categories of evidence: outcome reconciliations from prior commitments, attestations from peers or governance bodies, and self-audit lineage from the agent's own decision record. Every evidence packet carries a provenance tag, a confidence weight, and a timestamp. The mechanism does not treat raw assertions as integrity; only reconciled outcomes — predictions matched against subsequent measurements — increment the envelope.

The envelope expansion rule is deliberately asymmetric. Positive reconciliations contribute to the envelope at a rate governed by an evidence-weight function that discounts redundant attestations, recent contributions, and contributions from low-diversity sources. Negative reconciliations — promises broken, predictions falsified, audits failed — contribute immediately and at full weight. The asymmetry encodes the structural fact that trust accumulates slowly because evidence accumulates slowly, while loss of trust is properly instantaneous because a single counterexample falsifies the prior trajectory.

Saturation is enforced through a logistic ceiling on the envelope, parameterized by domain. As the envelope approaches its ceiling, marginal evidence yields diminishing increments. This prevents runaway accumulation in which an agent that has performed well on low-stakes tasks could be granted high-stakes delegation without commensurate evidence at that stake level. The mechanism additionally maintains separate envelopes for distinct delegation classes, so that integrity earned in one operational regime does not silently transfer to another.

Decay is continuous and unconditional. In the absence of fresh reconciled evidence, the envelope shrinks at a half-life determined by policy. Decay reflects the structural truth that integrity is a claim about future behavior supported by recent evidence; as the evidence ages, the claim weakens. Renewal requires fresh reconciliations, not merely fresh assertions. An agent cannot extend its trust slope by repeating prior commitments; it can extend the slope only by closing the loop on those commitments through measurable outcomes.

Operating Parameters

Implementations expose six tunable parameters under policy control. The evidence-weight function w(e) maps an evidence packet to a scalar contribution, with default weight scaled by source diversity and inverse to recent same-source contributions. The envelope ceiling C_d is set per delegation class d and represents the maximum integrity score attainable for that class. The asymmetry coefficient alpha determines the ratio of negative-evidence weight to positive-evidence weight; default alpha is 1.0 for negative and a domain-specific fraction for positive, typically between 0.05 and 0.20.

The decay half-life tau is set per delegation class and governs how quickly an unrenewed envelope contracts. Short half-lives are appropriate for high-volatility domains such as financial trading or safety-critical control; longer half-lives are appropriate for domains with slow feedback loops such as scientific publication or long-horizon stewardship. The minimum-evidence threshold m establishes the floor below which the slope is reported as undefined rather than zero, distinguishing absence of evidence from evidence of absence. The slope-validation window W defines the rolling interval over which the slope is computed for delegation decisions.

Each parameter is bound by a policy reference that is itself versioned and signed. Changes to parameters propagate through the agent's lineage, and any delegation decision made under prior parameters is permanently associated with those parameters in the audit trail. This ensures that retrospective audits can reconstruct exactly which thresholds governed which decision, eliminating ambiguity in compliance review.

Alternative Embodiments

In a multi-agent embodiment, peer attestations are themselves trust-slope-weighted. An agent's attestation of another agent's integrity is incorporated into the recipient's envelope at a weight proportional to the attesting agent's own validated slope in the relevant delegation class. This creates a non-circular reputation graph in which integrity propagates only through demonstrably reliable nodes. The embodiment includes cycle-detection to prevent mutual-attestation loops from inflating either party's score.

In a regulatory-overlay embodiment, an external governance body subscribes to the agent's slope channel and applies its own decay and ceiling parameters at the supervisory layer. The agent's internal envelope informs the regulator, but the regulator's envelope is the binding signal for delegation. This separation of concerns permits the agent to operate with self-consistent internal accounting while the regulator imposes external risk discipline.

In a domain-specialized embodiment, the envelope is decomposed into orthogonal sub-envelopes corresponding to distinct competency axes — for example, factual accuracy, normative compliance, schedule reliability, and resource stewardship. Each sub-envelope follows the same accumulation, saturation, and decay rules, and delegation decisions consult the relevant sub-envelope rather than a scalar aggregate. This embodiment is preferred where domain expertise on one axis does not imply expertise on another.

In a constrained-substrate embodiment suitable for edge deployments, the full evidence ledger is replaced by a sketch structure — a sliding-window count-min sketch over reconciliation events — that approximates the slope within bounded error while requiring constant memory. The embodiment trades exact reproducibility for substrate viability and is appropriate where audit reconstruction can be performed against a separately stored ledger.

Composition With Other Primitives

The integrity envelope and its slope are inputs to the agent's confidence governance primitive. Confidence assignments produced by the agent's reasoning subsystem are scaled by the slope before being acted upon. An agent on a positive trust slope is permitted to act on its own high-confidence judgments; an agent on a flat or negative slope is required to seek external validation before acting at the same confidence level. Composition is bidirectional: confidence calibration outcomes feed back into the integrity envelope as reconciled evidence.

The primitive also composes with the agent's forecasting subsystem. Forecasts are issued with explicit integrity stakes — claims that, if falsified, will negatively reconcile against the envelope. This forces honest forecasting: an agent that systematically overclaims will see its envelope contract, narrowing the delegation classes available to it, until the forecasting behavior corrects. The composition rule prevents the agent from issuing high-stakes forecasts beyond its currently validated envelope.

Discovery traversal — the agent's exploration of unfamiliar problem spaces — is gated by the slope through an exploration budget. Agents with strong positive slopes earn larger exploration budgets, on the principle that demonstrated integrity warrants greater latitude. Agents with weak or negative slopes operate within tighter exploration constraints and are required to commit to narrower hypothesis spaces before proceeding.

Distinction From Prior Art

Reputation systems in distributed networks compute scalar trust scores from peer ratings, but the prior art does not distinguish reconciled outcomes from raw assertions, does not enforce asymmetric evidence weighting, and does not impose decay in the absence of renewal. Such systems are subject to attestation inflation and to gradual drift in which an agent that performed well historically retains a high score indefinitely. The slope mechanism specified here is structurally immune to both failure modes.

Bayesian reputation models update belief about an agent's reliability based on observed outcomes. They share the reconciliation requirement but do not encode delegation-class separation, do not impose ceilings tied to stake level, and treat the underlying belief as a posterior distribution rather than a governance-grade signal. The envelope mechanism is not a posterior; it is a bounded, decaying, audit-grade quantity whose semantics are defined for delegation decisions rather than for predictive inference.

Continuous authentication systems in security literature monitor user behavior for deviation from baseline. They share the continuous-monitoring premise but operate on identity verification rather than on integrity trajectory, and they do not produce a delegation-class-aware signal usable by external governance. The mechanism specified here is a governance primitive, not an authentication primitive.

Governance and Audit Implications

The trust slope is not merely an internal parameter; it is a governance artifact. Because every contribution to the envelope is provenance-tagged, weighted, and timestamped, an external auditor can reconstruct the entire trajectory of an agent's integrity from its lineage alone. Audit reconstructions can answer questions of the form: at the moment a particular delegation decision was made, what was the envelope, what evidence supported it, and were the parameters in force consistent with the delegation class invoked? Conventional reputation systems cannot answer such questions; their state is the running aggregate of opaque updates rather than a reproducible function of timestamped evidence.

The asymmetry between slow accumulation and immediate negative reconciliation has direct implications for adversarial robustness. An adversary attempting to inflate an agent's envelope through forged or coordinated attestations confronts the diversity-discounting and recency-discounting weights in the evidence-weight function, which together cap the marginal contribution of any concentrated attestation campaign. An adversary attempting to depress an envelope through fabricated negative evidence is constrained by the reconciliation requirement: only outcomes matched against measurable subsequent reality count, and fabricated outcomes therefore cannot survive the reconciliation step. The combination yields an envelope that is structurally hard to manipulate in either direction.

The decay rule also serves a governance purpose beyond accuracy. By forcing continuous renewal, decay ensures that delegation authority is always backed by recent evidence, so that an agent retired from active operation cannot retain delegation authority indefinitely on the strength of a historical record. Decay is the mechanism by which the system encodes the principle that authority is earned in the present, not inherited from the past. The half-life parameter is therefore not a tuning knob to be optimized for performance; it is a policy statement about how quickly the relevant domain demands fresh evidence, and its setting is itself an auditable governance choice rather than an implementation detail.

A further governance benefit follows from the lineage binding between parameter versions and delegation decisions. Because every decision is permanently associated with the parameter set in force at the moment of decision, retrospective tightening of policy does not retroactively impugn prior decisions made under a more permissive policy. Conversely, retrospective loosening cannot rehabilitate a decision that failed under the policy in force at the time. The mechanism thereby supports the principle of contemporaneous compliance: an agent is judged against the rules that bound it when it acted, and the audit trail makes the judgment reproducible decades after the fact if the lineage is preserved.

Disclosure Scope

This disclosure encompasses the integrity envelope, the trust slope computed over a rolling window of reconciled evidence, the asymmetric evidence-weighting rule, the per-delegation-class saturation ceiling, the unconditional decay with policy-defined half-life, the minimum-evidence threshold for slope reportability, and the lineage binding between parameter versions and delegation decisions. The disclosure encompasses the primitive's composition with confidence governance, forecasting, and discovery traversal, and the four enumerated alternative embodiments. The disclosure is independent of substrate, decision-procedure implementation, and host application; the structural relationships between accumulation, saturation, decay, and renewal define the protected subject matter.