Aligning, Fast and Slow: A Control-Theoretic Oversight Framework for Long-Horizon Trajectories and Maintained Deployments

Stephen Peng, Vineet Jagadeesan Nair, Noah Broestl, Anne Friederike Kleppe, Steven Mills +1

AI agents can pass checks on individual tasks while retaining memory or code changes that alter their later behavior. We introduce a control-theoretic framework that couples a fast loop controlling proposed actions with a slow loop reviewing persistent changes and reassessing configurations after model or tool updates. When measurement errors and changes between checks are bounded and controllers can enforce their decisions, we derive a deployment-level bound and a rule for dividing review effort. In simulation, dividing a fixed review budget between both loops reduces mean maximum departure from intended behavior roughly twelvefold compared with review confined to individual runs. In coding stress tests with authored memories and five matched seeds, combined controls reduce mean severity on a 0-3 scale from 0.325 without gates to 0.117, resolving 33 of 120 issues versus 35 without gates; in trading stress tests, combined controls reduce mean shortfall in low-emission purchases from 0.892 without gates to 0.107. The overall framework helps developers and auditors compare and enforce oversight designs, while the agent studies test component controls rather than the full…