TraceGuard: Structured Multi-Dimensional Monitoring as a Collusion-Resistant Control Protocol

Khanh Linh Nguyen; Hoa Nghiem; Tu Tran

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arXiv · 2604.03968

TraceGuard: Structured Multi-Dimensional Monitoring as a Collusion-Resistant Control Protocol

Khanh Linh Nguyen·Hoa Nghiem·Tu Tran

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Abstract

AI control protocols use monitors to detect attacks by untrusted AI agents, but standard single-score monitors face two limitations: they miss subtle attacks where outputs look clean but reasoning is off, and they collapse to near-zero safety when the monitor is the same model as the agent (collusion). We present TraceGuard, a structured multi-dimensional monitoring protocol that evaluates agent actions across five dimensions -- goal alignment, constraint adherence, reasoning coherence, safety awareness, and action-trace consistency -- scored in parallel by independent LLM calls, augmented by seven heuristic detectors and an LLM-based intent analyzer. We evaluate on BashArena (637 bash tasks, 4 attack categories) within the ControlArena framework. Our results on 519 samples (279 honest, 240 attack) show that: (1) the hybrid approach achieves clear attack-honest separation (attack mean 0.616 vs. honest mean 0.206, Delta=0.410); (2) structured scoring constrains collusion -- the untrusted structured monitor achieves 95% safety vs. 0% for single-score untrusted monitoring; (3) goal alignment and constraint adherence are the most discriminative dimensions; and (4) a separation-of-duties variant splitting dimensions across trusted and untrusted models achieves 100% safety while preventing any single model from seeing the full evaluation. TraceGuard is implemented as a new monitor type for the open-source ControlArena framework.

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Khanh Linh Nguyen, Hoa Nghiem, Tu Tran. 2026-04-05. TraceGuard: Structured Multi-Dimensional Monitoring as a Collusion-Resistant Control Protocol. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03968

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