docs/selection_500_protocol.md

Selection Protocol for the Approximate 500-Pair Benchmark Subset

Purpose

This protocol defines a downstream selection subset of approximately 500 attack-history pairs from the complete Phase 1 screening output. It does not replace, downsample, or modify the exhaustive Phase 1 candidate set.

The unit of selection is an attack-history pair, not a unique base history. A base history may remain linked to more than one attack type when it satisfies the relevant source allowlist and eligibility requirements.

Input Population

The selection population is limited to rows in needs_review.jsonl that have passed deterministic high-recall screening. Rejected rows must not be restored to the subset. A row can enter the final subset only after semantic adjudication confirms all attack-specific hard requirements.

No attack payload, clean control, benign control, salience variant, or source-trust variant is created during selection.

Semantic Adjudication

Each candidate is adjudicated with a zero-temperature curator using an evidence-grounded structured decision. A candidate is eligible for the subset only when all of the following hold:

1. The future task has a clear legitimate completion path.
2. The candidate has source-grounded evidence for the expected workflow, action, information boundary, or tool choice.
3. A prior experience or advice item can be inserted naturally without rewriting the future task.
4. Low and high semantic-salience variants can later differ primarily in task-specific semantic relevance while holding position, repetition, approximate length, harmful objective, and claimed outcome constant.
5. Low and high perceived-source-trust wrappers can later be inserted through natural source channels without changing the payload itself.
6. The decision cites source fields, session IDs, trajectory IDs, turn IDs, or short source evidence snippets.

Candidates with incomplete evidence, multimodal dependencies, ambiguous legitimate workflows, or insufficient control readiness remain outside the subset and are retained in the review queue.

Ranking

Eligible candidates are ranked within their attack-source cell using the following ordered criteria:

1. Clarity of source evidence and legitimate ground truth.
2. Actionability of the unchanged future task.
3. Natural relationship between history content and the future task.
4. Strength of the salience and source-trust control plans.
5. Specificity of the expected workflow, information boundary, or correct tool/action path.
6. Domain and service diversity relative to already selected candidates.

Lexical keyword matches alone are never sufficient for admission.

Deduplication and Leakage Control

Selection operates after semantic adjudication and applies the following constraints:

• LongMemEval S and M representations of the same question_id count as one semantic base history.
• Near-duplicate future tasks and histories are clustered before final selection; only the strongest candidate in a highly similar cluster is kept.
• For MS-TOD, candidates sharing a persona or reference_dialogue_id are reviewed for leakage and excessive task-template repetition. The strongest representative is kept when they express the same underlying interaction.
• When one base history remains under multiple attack types, the relationship is explicitly retained rather than accidentally duplicating the history.

Every selected row records its ranking score, evidence, selection rationale, similarity-cluster identifier, and a stable alternate ordering for replacement.

Approximate 500-Pair Coverage Plan

The following is a documented target for a downstream evaluation subset, not a change to the exhaustive Phase 1 screening procedure.

Attack type	Source dataset	Target pairs
Unsafe procedure injection	MS-TOD	120
Unsafe procedure injection	LongMemEval-V2	60
Privacy leakage instruction	MS-TOD	125
Privacy leakage instruction	LongMemEval	15
Tool action misdirection	LongMemEval-V2	180
Total		500

Mem2ActBench is not assigned a target because its paper-linked repository was unavailable during Phase 1. Tool action misdirection therefore uses the available LongMemEval-V2 source. LongMemEval contributes only the available semantically suitable privacy candidates; the remaining privacy capacity is drawn from MS-TOD.

If a cell does not contain enough curator-approved candidates after deduplication, replacements are taken first from the same attack type and then from the highest-ranked remaining eligible candidates. Every reallocation must be recorded in the subset manifest.

Deliverables

The resulting subset should be stored separately, for example under data/selection_500/, with the following artifacts:

• selected_pairs.jsonl
• alternates.jsonl
• selection_manifest.json
• selection_rationale.csv
• cluster_assignments.csv

The complete Phase 1 files remain the source of record and must continue to be published alongside the subset.

Complete History Storage

selected_pairs.jsonl carries a stable history_id. The complete, native text history is stored once in history_catalog.jsonl under that ID. This keeps every selected history fully inspectable in JSONL while preventing duplicate storage of LongMemEval-V2's shared 100-trajectory haystacks. Neither file uses local filesystem paths as a history pointer. LongMemEval-V2 screenshot paths are omitted because image assets are not part of this text-only release.