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Evaluation

Critical regression

What is critical regression?

A critical regression is a failure on a case the model must never get wrong — a safety refusal, a compliance requirement, a known past incident. It is treated as a blocking failure regardless of how well the model scores on average.

Averages hide these by construction. A model that improves on ninety-nine per cent of cases and breaks the one that once caused an outage has a superb aggregate score and must not ship.

The practical form is a small, explicitly maintained set of cases with binary pass or fail outcomes, evaluated separately from the aggregate metric and given veto power over it.

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