SAHOO: Safeguarded Alignment for High-Order Optimization Objectives in Recursive Self-Improvement

TL;DR

SAHOO introduces a comprehensive framework with safeguards to monitor and control alignment drift in recursive self-improvement systems, leading to significant quality improvements while maintaining safety constraints across diverse tasks.

Contribution

The paper presents SAHOO, a novel practical framework with multiple safeguards to ensure alignment preservation during recursive self-improvement, addressing a key challenge in deploying such systems safely.

Findings

18.3% improvement in code generation tasks

16.8% improvement in reasoning tasks

Effective constraint preservation and low violations in truthfulness

Abstract

Recursive self-improvement is moving from theory to practice: modern systems can critique, revise, and evaluate their own outputs, yet iterative self-modification risks subtle alignment drift. We introduce SAHOO, a practical framework to monitor and control drift through three safeguards: (i) the Goal Drift Index (GDI), a learned multi-signal detector combining semantic, lexical, structural, and distributional measures; (ii) constraint preservation checks that enforce safety-critical invariants such as syntactic correctness and non-hallucination; and (iii) regression-risk quantification to flag improvement cycles that undo prior gains. Across 189 tasks in code generation, mathematical reasoning, and truthfulness, SAHOO produces substantial quality gains, including 18.3 percent improvement in code tasks and 16.8 percent in reasoning, while preserving constraints in two domains and maintaining low violations in truthfulness. Thresholds are calibrated on a small validation set of 18 tasks across three cycles. We further map the capability-alignment frontier, showing efficient early improvement cycles but rising alignment costs later and exposing domain-specific tensions such as fluency versus factuality. SAHOO therefore makes alignment preservation during recursive self-improvement measurable, deployable, and systematically validated at scale.