Probabilistic Sensing, Deterministic Authority: Admitting Model-Produced Observations into Sufficiency-Checked Governance Contracts

Abstract

When a field that an authority contract needs exists only in unstructured evidence, a model can sense it. We admit the model's output only as an observation record with a score. An admission policy, with thresholds fitted on a held-out split at a declared false-positive ceiling, maps each score to true, false or unknown. Unknown denies. A deterministic, sufficiency-checked contract decides. The probability that sensing changes the verdict is bounded by the sum, over the contract's sensed fields, of the admitted-wrong and unknown rates. This is an instantiation of union-bound reasoning, indexed by the contract. Minimising the estimated bound is a valid cost model for choosing among sufficient contracts. In a registered study on two constructed domains with two sensor families (36,000 model calls), no cell refuted the bound. Deny-to-allow changes from sensing appeared for the first time in this programme: 13 of 21,000 test verdicts, all from 3 contradictory records; each flip in a cell with a registered bound lay under it. Sensing-aware selection picked the lower-exposure contract in 4 of 4 registered tests. Both sensors' scores were informative but not calibrated. Correctness is relative to the declared loss model, candidate representation and reachable states; all domains are constructed.