We show that the statement “every universally Baire set of reals has the perfect set property” is equiconsistent modulo ZFC with the existence of a cardinal that we call virtually Shelah for supercompactness (VSS). These cardinals resemble Shelah cardinals and Shelah-for-supercompactness cardinals but are much weaker: if $0^\sharp $ exists then every Silver indiscernible is VSS in L. We also show that the statement $\operatorname {\mathrm {uB}} = {\boldsymbol {\Delta }}^1_2$ , where $\operatorname {\mathrm {uB}}$ is the pointclass of all universally Baire sets of reals, is equiconsistent modulo ZFC with the existence of a $\Sigma _2$ -reflecting VSS cardinal.

We prove several equivalences and relative consistency results regarding generic absoluteness beyond Woodin’s ${\left( {{\bf{\Sigma }}_1^2} \right)^{{\rm{u}}{{\rm{B}}_\lambda }}}$ generic absoluteness result for a limit of Woodin cardinals λ. In particular, we prove that two-step $\exists ^ℝ \left( {{\rm{\Pi }}_1^2 } \right)^{{\rm{uB}}_\lambda } $ generic absoluteness below a measurable limit of Woodin cardinals has high consistency strength and is equivalent, modulo small forcing, to the existence of trees for ${\left( {{\bf{\Pi }}_1^2} \right)^{{\rm{u}}{{\rm{B}}_\lambda }}}$ formulas. The construction of these trees uses a general method for building an absolute complement for a given tree T assuming many “failures of covering” for the models $L\left( {T,{V_\alpha }} \right)$ for α below a measurable cardinal.