Calibrate-Then-Delegate: Safety Monitoring with Risk and Budget Guarantees via Model Cascades
arXiv:2604.14251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monitoring LLM safety at scale requires balancing cost and accuracy: a cheap latent-space probe can screen every input, but hard cases should be escalated to a more expensive expert. Existing cascades delegate based on probe uncertainty, but uncertainty is a poor proxy for delegation benefit, as it ignores whether the expert would actually correct the error. To address this problem, we introduce Calibrate-Then-Delegate (CTD), a model-cascade approach that provides probabilistic guarantees on the […]