Calibrated Collective Oversight: arXiv Paper Shows Weaker Overseers Can Constrain Misaligned Stronger Agents

arXiv·medium signal

Overman & Bayati (submitted May 27, arXiv 2605.28807) introduce Calibrated Collective Oversight (CCO), a framework that combines diverse scoring functions into a penalty measuring deviation from a conservative baseline, calibrated via Conformal Decision Theory. Testing on modified SWE-bench and MACHIAVELLI benchmarks, weaker overseers successfully constrained misaligned stronger agents — ethical violations decreased substantially while task performance remained intact. Directly relevant to the scaling oversight problem as agents approach superhuman capability.