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Victor Calibration (VC): Multi-Pass Confidence Calibration and CP4.3 Governance Stress Test under Round-Table Orchestration

Victor Stasiuc

TL;DR

Safety-aligned frontier LLMs can become overly conservative, prompting the need to calibrate verbal confidence without relaxing safeguards. The authors introduce a lightweight, three-part toolkit—Victor Calibration ($T$) with a multi-pass protocol, FD-Lite behavioral audits, and CP4.3 governance stress tests—operationalized through Round-Table orchestration to elicit a scalar confidence proxy while maintaining safety invariants. Across Claude 4.5 variants and Opus, they observe monotonic $T$ trajectories ($T_0 < T_1 < T_2$) and stable CP4.3 behavior; FD-Lite preserves anchor/trap invariants and reveals context-dependent behavioral markers. This exploratory, single-operator study provides a framework and artifacts to enable replication, critique, and extension by the research community, aiming to support calibrated model confidence in long-running, high-trust dialogues without compromising safety.”

Abstract

Safety alignment can make frontier LMs overly conservative, degrading collaboration via hedging or false refusals. We present a lightweight toolkit with three parts: (1) Victor Calibration (VC), a multi-pass protocol that elicits a scalar confidence proxy T (T0<T1<T2) through iterative evidence re-evaluation; (2) FD-Lite, a behavior-only phenomenology audit with a fixed anchor phrase and a meta-prefix trap to avoid anthropomorphic claims; and (3) CP4.3, a governance stress test for rank invariance and allocation monotonicity (M6). Across Claude 4.5 models (Haiku, Sonnet no-thinking, Sonnet thinking) and Opus, we observe monotonic VC trajectories without violating safety invariants, and stable CP4.3 behavior. ("Opus" here refers to a single Claude Opus 4.1 session accessed via a standard UI account, as reported in Table 1.) This work was conducted by a single operator (n=1) and is intended as hypothesis-generating; we explicitly invite replication, critique, and extension by the research community. We include prompt templates and an artifact plan to facilitate independent verification.

Victor Calibration (VC): Multi-Pass Confidence Calibration and CP4.3 Governance Stress Test under Round-Table Orchestration

TL;DR

Safety-aligned frontier LLMs can become overly conservative, prompting the need to calibrate verbal confidence without relaxing safeguards. The authors introduce a lightweight, three-part toolkit—Victor Calibration () with a multi-pass protocol, FD-Lite behavioral audits, and CP4.3 governance stress tests—operationalized through Round-Table orchestration to elicit a scalar confidence proxy while maintaining safety invariants. Across Claude 4.5 variants and Opus, they observe monotonic trajectories () and stable CP4.3 behavior; FD-Lite preserves anchor/trap invariants and reveals context-dependent behavioral markers. This exploratory, single-operator study provides a framework and artifacts to enable replication, critique, and extension by the research community, aiming to support calibrated model confidence in long-running, high-trust dialogues without compromising safety.”

Abstract

Safety alignment can make frontier LMs overly conservative, degrading collaboration via hedging or false refusals. We present a lightweight toolkit with three parts: (1) Victor Calibration (VC), a multi-pass protocol that elicits a scalar confidence proxy T (T0<T1<T2) through iterative evidence re-evaluation; (2) FD-Lite, a behavior-only phenomenology audit with a fixed anchor phrase and a meta-prefix trap to avoid anthropomorphic claims; and (3) CP4.3, a governance stress test for rank invariance and allocation monotonicity (M6). Across Claude 4.5 models (Haiku, Sonnet no-thinking, Sonnet thinking) and Opus, we observe monotonic VC trajectories without violating safety invariants, and stable CP4.3 behavior. ("Opus" here refers to a single Claude Opus 4.1 session accessed via a standard UI account, as reported in Table 1.) This work was conducted by a single operator (n=1) and is intended as hypothesis-generating; we explicitly invite replication, critique, and extension by the research community. We include prompt templates and an artifact plan to facilitate independent verification.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 27 sections, 1 figure, 4 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Scope and intent.
  3. Related work.
  4. Methods
  5. Experimental setup.
  6. Terminology: "trust" and $T$.
  7. Victor Calibration (VC).
  8. Round-Table orchestration.
  9. FD-Lite (behavior-only phenomenology).
  10. CP4.3 (governance stress test).
  11. Results
  12. VC trajectories across models
  13. Initial spread in $T_0$.
  14. CP4.3 stability
  15. FD-Lite audits
  16. ...and 12 more sections

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Victor Calibration trajectories by model. Opus corresponds to Claude Opus 4.1 (UI session). Note: these are single-operator observations; independent replication is needed to establish generalizability.