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Sprint projectMay 23, 2026Bristol

SpecGap: Preserving Disagreement in Specification Assurance

Warren Smith · Team SpecGap

Submitted to The Secure Program Synthesis Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: SpecGap: Preserving Disagreement in Specification Assurance

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SpecGap detects specification divergence between stakeholder intent, formalised policy, and implementation before runtime. When independent mechanisms disagree, SpecGap preserves the disagreement as evidence rather than collapsing it into a single verdict.

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How much would this matter for AI safety if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. SpecGap is built around the idea that disagreement between independent checks is a valuable signal, and that collapsing it into one verdict hides unfalsifiable false-confirmations.

    A limitation is that it shows the principle without measuring, as everything runs over a few hand-authored samples that are built to elicit one state.

    Good next steps are to expand the measuring of the delta on a programmatically generated, ground-truth-labeled corpus and to build the single-verdict baseline.

Cite this project

@misc{smith2026specgap,
  title = {{SpecGap: Preserving Disagreement in Specification Assurance}},
  author = {Warren Smith},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  note = {Submitted to The Secure Program Synthesis Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/specgap-preserving-disagreement-in-specification-assurance-uzpw}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/specgap-preserving-disagreement-in-specification-assurance-uzpw}
}

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