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Main Authors: Leshin, Jonah, Shah, Manish, Timmis, Ian, Kang, Daniel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19022
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author Leshin, Jonah
Shah, Manish
Timmis, Ian
Kang, Daniel
author_facet Leshin, Jonah
Shah, Manish
Timmis, Ian
Kang, Daniel
contents The consistency of AI-native applications depends on the behavioral consistency of the model endpoints that power them. Traditional reliability metrics such as uptime, latency and throughput do not capture behavioral change, and an endpoint can remain "healthy" while its effective model identity changes due to updates to weights, tokenizers, quantization, inference engines, kernels, caching, routing, or hardware. We introduce Stability Monitor, a black-box stability monitoring system that periodically fingerprints an endpoint by sampling outputs from a fixed prompt set and comparing the resulting output distributions over time. Fingerprints are compared using a summed energy distance statistic across prompts, with permutation-test p-values as evidence of distribution shift aggregated sequentially to detect change events and define stability periods. In controlled validation, Stability Monitor detects changes to model family, version, inference stack, quantization, and behavioral parameters. In real-world monitoring of the same model hosted by multiple providers, we observe substantial provider-to-provider and within-provider stability differences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_19022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Behavioral Fingerprints for LLM Endpoint Stability and Identity
Leshin, Jonah
Shah, Manish
Timmis, Ian
Kang, Daniel
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.1; D.2.5
The consistency of AI-native applications depends on the behavioral consistency of the model endpoints that power them. Traditional reliability metrics such as uptime, latency and throughput do not capture behavioral change, and an endpoint can remain "healthy" while its effective model identity changes due to updates to weights, tokenizers, quantization, inference engines, kernels, caching, routing, or hardware. We introduce Stability Monitor, a black-box stability monitoring system that periodically fingerprints an endpoint by sampling outputs from a fixed prompt set and comparing the resulting output distributions over time. Fingerprints are compared using a summed energy distance statistic across prompts, with permutation-test p-values as evidence of distribution shift aggregated sequentially to detect change events and define stability periods. In controlled validation, Stability Monitor detects changes to model family, version, inference stack, quantization, and behavioral parameters. In real-world monitoring of the same model hosted by multiple providers, we observe substantial provider-to-provider and within-provider stability differences.
title Behavioral Fingerprints for LLM Endpoint Stability and Identity
topic Artificial Intelligence
I.2.1; D.2.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.19022