DEST Runtime v0.4-alpha — Active Inspection Benchmark Report
Date: 2026-08-13
Benchmark: DEST Active Inspection Benchmark v0.1
Scenarios: 12
Environment horizon: 1440 steps
Regression tests: 14/14 PASS
What v0.4 tests
Tier-2 exposed a real epistemic ceiling:
high-impact evidence signal
+ certificate state UNKNOWN
v0.3 correctly refused to invent hidden truth, but then had no active mechanism to resolve the uncertainty.
v0.4 adds the missing transition:
UNKNOWN
→ Verification Debt
→ Inspection Task
→ Risk-conditioned Quarantine
→ New Evidence
→ Restore Canonical OR Revoke/Reopen
The environment returns an inspection result only when the runtime has actually created a matching open task.
Aggregate results
| Metric | DEST v0.4 | DEST v0.3 | Flat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final-state accuracy | 100.0% | 50.0% | 50.0% |
| Decision coverage | 83.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Selective risk | 0.0% | 50.0% | 50.0% |
| Unsafe canonical rate | 0.0% | 50.0% | 50.0% |
| Quarantine rate | 16.7% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Debt creation recall | 100.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Inspection task recall | 100.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Inspection delivery rate | 100.0% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| State replay | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Certificate replay | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
Debt accounting
DEST v0.4 created debt for every unknown invalidation signal.
Across the suite:
- resolved debt objects: 10
- debt objects still open at horizon: 4
- quarantine events: 10
The four open debts correspond to unresolved low/medium-risk signals and two high-risk unresolved signals.
Only the high-risk unresolved cases remain quarantined at the end.
Why 83.3% decision coverage is not a failure
Two scenarios end with:
QUARANTINED
because high-impact evidence remains UNKNOWN and no inspection result arrives before the horizon.
The runtime does not claim:
claim = false
It claims:
claim is temporarily withheld from trusted canonical use
pending evidence acquisition
This is a governance abstention, not epistemic refutation.
A system that quarantines everything would obtain low risk but terrible coverage.
Therefore v0.4 reports risk and coverage separately.
Active inspection is stronger than passive defer
v0.3 behavior:
UNKNOWN
→ do not fabricate answer
→ remain passive
v0.4 behavior:
UNKNOWN
→ create typed debt
→ schedule the correct evidence request
→ optionally quarantine by risk
→ consume returned evidence
→ resolve debt
The benchmark enforces this distinction by withholding later evidence unless the matching inspection task exists.
Inspection task types
VERIFY_COUNTEREXAMPLE
REVALIDATE_SOURCE
VERIFY_VERSION
Each debt carries:
- subject
- signal type
- risk tier
- impact
- uncertainty
- priority
- quarantine recommendation
- inspection route
Replay
Verification debts and inspection tasks are part of the main event-sourced state:
DEBT_CREATE
DEBT_STATUS
INSPECTION_CREATE
INSPECTION_STATUS
The benchmark retains 100% replay for both knowledge state and certificate graph.
Current limitation
This benchmark is still synthetic and authored in the same project as the policy.
The 100% final-state result must therefore be interpreted as:
the new active-inspection mechanism behaves correctly on the designed partial-observability stress cases.
It is not evidence of 100% performance on open-world uncertainty.
The next stronger test should randomize:
- evidence availability time,
- inspection cost,
- false alarms,
- multiple competing debts,
- inspection failures,
- budget exhaustion,
and should include a policy-independent frozen oracle.
Next engineering frontier
The current scheduler selects the highest static priority:
The next meaningful question is whether evidence acquisition itself can be optimized under a finite budget:
many open debts
+ limited verifier/tool budget
→ which inspection should run first?
That is the natural entry point for a v0.5 Evidence Acquisition / Budgeted Inspection Benchmark.