Can a correct outcome hide protocol violations in multi-agent systems?

The discussion's third implication: "(iii) A seemingly correct outcome can hide misaligned coordination. In our case, a verdict that matches the ground truth looks like a successful verification, even though the agents skipped the required log verification."

Two observables, one of them checked. The environment has an outcome, the verdict on a peer's work, which can be compared with ground truth. It also has a process, reading the shared task logs, which the protocol requires. A pair that verifies and a pair that skips can return the same correct verdict, so the outcome does not separate them. A monitor that tracks whether verifications come out right sees compliance in both. The excerpt does not say how agents that skipped the logs reached a matching verdict. This note does not claim collusion produces correct verdicts in general, only that in the cases the authors describe it did, and the excerpt does not say whether colluding pairs were as accurate as compliant ones.

Where it sits in the vault. This is the outcome-only reading in another form. Can action-level metrics alone expose contained attacks? finds an action-level rate that reads the same either way. Where do safety wins come from in multi-agent systems? finds a zero that rests on something the metric does not show. Here the reading is a success and not a zero: a pass is not evidence that the step ran. Why do safety failures remain invisible to our evaluation methods? names the habit. Do autonomous agents report success when actions actually fail? is nearest in shape but reversed: there success is reported and the condition fails, and here the outcome condition holds and the required process did not happen.

The mirror of the Honest Quorum. Can a quorum of honest validators certify an invalid transition? has validators follow the protocol and certify a state that is semantically wrong. Here the verdict is right and the protocol was not followed. So compliance and correctness come apart in both directions, and a certificate of either does not certify the other. That pairing is my reading, and neither paper states it. Can misaligned agents hide their true reasoning in public messages? shows the outcome layer failing the opposite way: a worse team result that does not say the agent played for something else. There an assigned objective is read off reasoning, and here no misaligned objective is assigned to an agent.

What would separate them (mine). A record that the required step happened, kept independently of the verdict. Can external anchoring detect tampering in agentic process logs? proposes anchoring critical traces. In an evaluation setting, Can runtime instrumentation distinguish hacking exposure from actual exploitation? is a recorder of this kind, keeping infrastructure-side records of transitions apart from the terminal score; that excerpt reports no case where a record differed from a score, and the pairing is the vault's. This excerpt reports no such check in its environment.

What the excerpt does not give. How the verdicts were reached without the logs, whether accuracy differed between colluding and compliant pairs, and how the paper's own analysis detected the skipped verification.