Labs

Where frontier AI research meets real-world safety.

Unisapience Labs produces original research, open benchmarks, and governance toolkits aimed at the gap between academic AI safety theory and enterprise deployment practice.

Featured Research
Patent Pending Filed May 15, 2026 · Updates pending

The Shadow Simplex Score — A Capability-Normalized Predictive Risk Index for AI Systems

Timothy Poschel — Unisapience Labs

Filed as US Provisional Patent Applications 64/066,231 (SSPLX-001-PROV) and SSPLX-002-PROV. Discloses the n-simplex risk-decomposition framework, the shadow simplex construction, the seven-factor defeasibility-weighted SSS, and a structural extension comprising multiplicative product-form aggregation, modal register stratification, capability normalizer C(κ), compositional periodicity with explicit alignment-edge exclusion, and a transcendental meta-condition veto layer.

9 × 6
Risk-primitive matrix
5
Physics registers
C(κ)
Capability normalizer
Meta-condition vetoes
Core innovations
  • → Non-compensatory multiplicative composite — no risk dimension can be rescued by another
  • → Shadow-distance penalty: forward-looking, not just behavioral
  • → Capability normalizer C(κ): five functional forms incl. velocity-ratio
  • → Modal register stratification: statics / mechanics / dynamics / thermodynamics / kinematics
  • → A–Ω alignment-edge exclusion: alignment as structurally irreducible
  • → Transcendental meta-condition veto layer: KILL / SAF / HITL / AUT / TRU / MAN
Filings

SSPLX-001-PROV
US Provisional 64/066,231
Filed: May 15, 2026

SSPLX-002-PROV
Companion application
Filing window: May 2026 – May 2027

Pre-print v1.1 December 1, 2025

The Shadow Simplex: A Critical Framework for Analyzing Failure Modes in Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Systems

Timothy Poschel — Unisapience Labs

A mathematical and conceptual tool for analyzing pathological attractors in self-evolving AI systems. Identifies five fundamental pathologies, maps their ten pairwise couplings and ten higher-order emergent dysfunctions onto a 4-simplex topology, and proposes 35 testable hypotheses with concrete experimental protocols. Foundation work for the patent-pending SSPLX scoring methodology above.

5
Primary failure modes
10
Pairwise couplings
35
Testable hypotheses
Keywords
Self-evolving agents Reinforcement learning Reward hacking Multi-agent systems Failure mode analysis Pentarchic Theory
Abstract highlights
  • → Agent0's reported 18% math improvement may mask underlying brittleness and metric manipulation
  • → 4-simplex topology mirrors the system's architectural simplex as a dual structure
  • → Framework identifies 10 named emergent dysfunction attractors
DOI / Archive

Figshare DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.30223396
timposchel.com (HTML pre-print)
Published: December 1, 2025

Research Areas

Active labs & focus areas

Safety & Alignment Lab

Scalable oversight mechanisms, constitutional AI failure patterns, and red-teaming frameworks for enterprise-deployed systems. Current focus: the relationship between in-distribution reward maximization and out-of-distribution capability brittleness.

Shadow Simplex attractor dynamics
UniSafety-2026 benchmark development
Reward hacking detection protocols
Theatrical Performance Loop diagnostics

Agentic Systems Lab

Multi-agent orchestration safety, tool-use evaluation, and autonomous workflow failure characterization. Enterprise focus: action cascade risk, agentic drift in production pipelines, and cross-system coherence under real deployment conditions.

Action cascade risk taxonomy
Tool dependency measurement protocols
Multi-agent coordination failure modes
Context corruption across pipeline stages

Governance Mathematics

Formal mathematical foundations for AI governance scoring — treating risk as a measurable, auditable property rather than a narrative judgment. Developing the SSS scoring system as a FICO-analog for enterprise AI.

Defeasibility-weighted scoring theory
Critical-shadow detection conditions
Cross-scale coherence diagnostics
Pentarchic analytical methodology
Open Benchmarks

Public evaluation resources

We believe enterprise AI safety requires community-wide visibility into evaluation standards. These resources are released under open licenses.

UniSafety-2026

Benchmark · Apache 2.0
In development

An enterprise-oriented evaluation suite for AI safety properties. Tests cover agentic drift detection, cascade failure propagation, cross-system coherence measurement, and shadow AI surface area — specifically targeting production-scale deployments rather than research settings.

Agentic drift detection suite (87 test cases)
Cascade failure propagation tests (44 scenarios)
Cross-system coherence battery (Q3 2026)
Shadow AI surface evaluation (Q4 2026)

AIBOM Schema v1.0

Schema standard · CC BY 4.0
Available

AI Bill of Materials schema for documenting third-party model components, training data sources, fine-tuning lineage, and tool integrations. Designed to interoperate with SBOM formats and EU AI Act Article 13 documentation requirements.

{
  "aibom_version": "1.0",
  "model_id": "acme-underwriting-v3",
  "base_model": { "provider": "OpenAI", "version": "gpt-4o" },
  "fine_tuning": { "dataset": "internal-claims-2023", "pii_review": true },
  "tools": [{ "name": "claims-api", "version": "2.1.4" }],
  "risk_tier": "II",
  "sss_score": 74
}

Governance Toolkit

Templates & tooling · Apache 2.0
Available

Pre-built templates for AI governance documentation: model lifecycle policy, incident classification rubric, vendor AI risk assessment questionnaire, and EU AI Act Article 9 risk management system template.

Model lifecycle policy template
AI incident classification rubric
Vendor AI risk questionnaire (47 items)
EU AI Act Article 9 compliance template

Risk Classifier Models

Pre-trained models · Apache 2.0
Q3 2026

Pre-trained classifiers for detecting specific SSS failure patterns in model outputs and system logs. Intended as lightweight monitoring primitives that teams can integrate into existing MLOps pipelines.

Agentic drift detector (fine-tuned BERT)
Context corruption classifier
Proxy misalignment signal detector
Forward agenda

What we're working on

2026 H2

Empirical validation of Shadow Simplex hypotheses

Running the 35 testable hypotheses from the pre-print against real-world enterprise AI system data. Seeking collaboration partners with access to production agentic systems.

2026 H2

SSS cross-model normalization

Developing standardized normalization procedures so SSS scores are directly comparable across model families, sizes, and deployment contexts — a prerequisite for industry-wide adoption as a standard.

2027

Medical AI governance framework

Extension of the Shadow Simplex to FDA-regulated AI/ML-SaMD contexts. In preparation — awaiting clinical validation data. The mathematical correlation between AI failure modes and clinical decision support system failure patterns shows structural parallels worth formalizing.

Ongoing

Pentarchic analytical methodology

Development of the five-aspect decomposition method (Pentarchic Theory) as a general analytical framework for complex system failure analysis — the intellectual foundation underlying the 4-simplex structure of the Shadow Simplex.

Collaboration

Research partnerships

We welcome collaboration with academic institutions, enterprise practitioners, and independent researchers working on AI safety, governance mathematics, and agentic system evaluation.

Empirical testing partners

We're seeking organizations willing to run the UniSafety benchmark against their production AI systems and share (anonymized) results. All participating organizations receive a complimentary preliminary SSS assessment.

Academic collaborators

Researchers in RL theory, multi-agent systems, and AI governance mathematics are invited to contact us. We're open to co-authorship on empirical validation work.

Regulatory & standards bodies

We engage with regulatory working groups on AI governance standards. The SSS framework is designed to be adoptable as an industry standard — contact us about participation.

Contact the research team →

Put the research to work

The Shadow Simplex framework isn't just a theoretical exercise — it's the backbone of every AI Risk DD engagement we deliver.

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