arXiv AI

Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Null

arXiv:2608. 20290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Open-Weight Masked Introspection: Measuring What Language Models Can Report About Their Own Computation

The study investigates whether open‑weight language models can introspect on their own internal computations. Using the Open‑Weight Masked Introspection (OWMI) framework, researchers intervened on various internal components of eight models and asked them to report whether changes had occurred. Across 78,000 measurements, none of the models reliably distinguished real interventions from sham ones, with AUROC values essentially at chance. Why It Matters: The findings suggest that current open‑weight models lack the ability to audit their own internal states, highlighting a limitation for oversight that relies on a model’s self‑reporting.

By Emilio Ferrara
arXiv AI
6d ago

Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay

arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.

By Haiyue Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.

By Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Lan Xu, Ning Zheng