CascadeLedger: Counterfactual Auditing of Information and Resource Integrity in LLM Cascades

arXiv:2610.20668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce CascadeLedger, a counterfactual execution-audit framework for budgeted language-model cascades. The protocol enforces call-before-read semantics, binds successful reads to service and cache identities, records availability and component-wise budget transitions, and freezes the event trace before any target or task scorer is joined. The central object is aggregate-equivalent trace validity: two executions can share a final answer, declared resource projection, and service histogram while differing in whether their routing decisions used only legitimately observable information. We complement single-trace invariants with counterfactual prefix non-interference (CPNI), which couples a visible prefix and policy randomness while changing only a declared hidden family. The counterfactual influence frontier (CIF) localizes the earliest violating prefix and a minimal hidden witness; projection-preserving adversarial mutation (PPAM) searches for invalid traces that remain acceptable to a non-counterfactual checker. Across frozen-cache, independently generated, and serving evaluations, the two-layer audit reports a clean false-positive rate of 0.0000, detects 0.9983 of serialized faults and 0.9982 of unlogged hidden-read faults, and changes 0.3403 of corrupted quality-resource conclusions after deterministic recomputation. The online recorder and offline CPNI audit have separate overhead measurements. Learned routing and semantic verification provide downstream compatibility studies under the same execution contract.