AUDITPLAN: Commit, Then Answer for Auditable Safety Alignment

arXiv:2609.19325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety tuning pipelines judge only the final answer, which makes it difficult to distinguish robust refusal from two undesirable shortcuts: blanket refusal on benign requests and polished but unfaithful safety rationales that do not actually constrain the answer. We propose AUDITPLAN, a single-model plan-then-answer approach where the model first emits a compact structured safety plan and then answers conditioned on it. The plan records a threat label, intended action, and explicit constraints, enabling machine-checkable auditing while remaining hidden from users at deployment. We train this behavior with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning with FAITHGATE, a reward-gating objective that grants answer reward only when the safety plan is correct. This discourages safe-looking but unfaithful behavior and promotes tighter plan-answer coupling. Across Qwen backbones, AUDITPLAN improves both robustness and auditability: on Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, FAITHGATE reduces ASR from 24.0% to 11.6%, LSR from 1.0% to 0.36%, and over-refusal from 11.0% to 2.0%, outperforming answer-only RL, free-form explanation, and weighted-sum structured rewards. Similar trends hold for Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct. Larger-model confirmation runs on Qwen-3-4B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct preserve the same trend suggesting that explicit internal commitments can make safety alignment more faithful, robust, and auditable.