arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25
Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues
arXiv:2608. 12599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.
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Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24
Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One
A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all. Give a model a memory that kept a wrong conclusion but dropped the work behind it, and it emits that stale value as a confident answer; give the same model an empty memory and it abstains.
arXiv AI
Aug 24
Calibrating Criterion Revision in LLM Agents: Failure Modes and a Trace-Anchored Protocol
The paper introduces a framework for evaluating how large language model agents revise their success criteria after failures, defining five non‑compensatory conditions that must be met for a criterion revision to be considered valid. Using the CMB‑0.1 protocol, the authors test twelve cross‑domain scenarios across four system configurations, finding that no model trial satisfies all five conditions and highlighting specific failure modes such as zero‑state reconstruction and inadequate intervention sensitivity. They propose a more stringent trace‑anchored CMB‑0.4 protocol to better isolate and measure criterion revision in future studies.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
When "Must" Becomes "Maybe": Constraint Weakening in LLM Agent Workflows
Large language model agents coordinate tasks via multi‑role, multi‑stage workflows that transform upstream state into intermediate artifacts such as summaries and plans. The study shows that when these artifacts are transformed—through compression, plan assimilation, or other handoff methods—the strict action‑binding constraints on upstream state can be weakened, turning mandatory requirements into optional information. In 1,296 synthetic episodes, direct handoff preserved all safety blockers, whereas transformed handoffs frequently deactivated or forbidden actions, but restoring full state fields or applying downstream verification can recover preservation.
arXiv AI
Jul 22
Binding Drift in Multi-Step Tool-Augmented Agents
arXiv:2607. 18316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented language-model agents execute multi-step workflows over external systems, resolving an entity once and then acting on it across subsequent steps.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
Feedback That Backfires: Why Small Language Model Agents Repeat the Call They Just Watched Fail
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
arXiv AI
Sep 2
REVISE: Validity-Guided Recovery for Online Revisions in Agent Workflows
The paper introduces “Revise”, a runtime system that performs validity-guided, fine-grained recovery for online revisions in structured agent workflows. When a revision arrives, Revise intersects the change with recorded data and control dependencies, propagates the impact through the partially executed DAG, stops invalid work, preserves unaffected progress, and recomputes only the affected region. Experiments on real coding‑agent traces and LangGraph/LLMCompiler applications show that Revise matches a latest‑version oracle, reduces model calls by up to 56%, and improves service‑level objective goodput under load.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23
How Strongly Should Task State Influence an LLM Agent?
arXiv:2609.25686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon assigned work requires an LLM agent to track the state of a task: which steps are done, blocked, cancelled, or open to repetition. Agent...
arXiv AI
Sep 25
Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races
The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.
arXiv AI
Aug 14
Governed Persistent Memory: Source-Bound State Semantics and Fail-Closed Release for Long-Horizon Agents
arXiv:2608. 12476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term agent memory is usually treated as select--store--retrieve, but retrieval does not decide whether contradictory, superseded, retracted, deleted, or stale records may support an outgoing claim.
arXiv AI
2d ago
ContractRL: Shielded Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Auditable Tool-Call Repair
ContractRL introduces a contract-constrained sequential repair protocol for structured tool calls, modeling verifier-guided JSON repair as a bounded decision process. The policy observes candidate data, verifier feedback, JSON pointers, repair history, and budget, using a contract-derived action mask to filter invalid operations before a deterministic validator applies changes. Compared to Patch‑SFT and full regeneration, ContractRL achieves higher semantic success (0.9362 vs. 0.9076 and 0.9148) while generating fewer tokens (34.4 vs. 44.9 and 137.2), and policy optimization further improves success rates.
arXiv AI
Aug 7
Runtime Observability for Heterogeneous Attention Memory
arXiv:2608. 05863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern models no longer keep a plain KV cache: latent caches, learned sparse selectors and recurrent states each carry the model's memory in a different form, and each fails differently under compression.