Paper 2026/2703

Efficient Scalable Oversight via Rewinding

Abstract

Scalable oversight asks how a weak verifier can check the outputs of computations performed by more powerful AI systems. One proposed approach uses relativizing interactive proofs, in which a weak verifier checks the output of a complex oracle-aided computation by interacting with one or more powerful provers. A prominent example is debate, which is highly efficient but assumes that one of two powerful AI models, or provers, is truthful. For certain classes of oracle-aided computations, this assumption can be removed, but at substantially greater computational cost. In this work, we introduce \emph{rewindable interactive proofs} (RIPs), a new model of relativizing interactive proofs for scalable oversight. In an RIP, the verifier may rewind the prover to an earlier state of the interaction and continue from there. This is possible when the prover is an AI model, since the verifier can save a snapshot of the model's state and later restore it. We construct a relativizing RIP for computations whose outputs are robust to changing a small fraction of oracle answers. Our construction is more efficient than prior relativizing proofs that do not assume a truthful prover, and it uses no cryptography. In our construction the honest prover runs in time linear in that of the original computation, and the verifier, after a one-time preprocessing step, runs in time nearly linear in the input length (which can be much smaller than the computation itself). We implement our protocol, report a preliminary MNIST experiment, and show that an RIP can be faster than a state-of-the-art deployed proof system. RIPs may be of independent interest. Rewinding is possible whenever the verifier controls the prover's machine, for example when the prover runs on trusted hardware or in a virtual machine whose state can be checkpointed.