arXiv AI

The belief-action gap in language model agents

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief States

Beyond Memory: Harnessing Long-Horizon Agents with Explicit Belief States introduces PoS, an inference-time framework that builds and maintains explicit belief states to guide large language model agents. Each belief state combines an estimate of the current world with unresolved task requirements, making clear what the agent still needs to learn and accomplish. PoS validates consistency, monitors task progress to detect Belief Trapping, and tailors recovery to the trapping pattern and unresolved requirements, achieving top performance across four benchmarks with all three LLM backbones.

By Yu Luo, Jiamin Jiang, Yimin Zuo, Xidao Wen, Rongchen Gao, Yongqian Sun, Shenglin Zhang, Guiyang Liu, Cheng Zhang, Fang Situ, Qi Zhou, Dan Pei
arXiv AI
Aug 26

MetaRAG: Belief-Action Aligned Policy Optimization for Agentic RAG

MetaRAG introduces a belief-action aligned policy optimization framework for agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). It incorporates Verify-first Action Generation and Internal Belief Probing to assess whether the current evidence is sufficient before taking an action, and uses a consistency reward gated by answer correctness to guide training. Experiments on seven public QA benchmarks demonstrate that MetaRAG improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing RL-based agentic RAG baselines, with benefits that transfer across research settings, optimizers, and model backbones.

By Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Jiamu Wang, Jinjian Zhang, Wei Zhou, Pengcheng Zhu, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Qiang Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 3

From Actions to Understanding: Conformal Interpretability of Temporal Concepts in LLM Agents

arXiv:2604. 19775v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and acting within interactive environments.

By Trilok Padhi, Ramneet Kaur, Krishiv Agarwal, Adam D. Cobb, Daniel Elenius, Manoj Acharya, Colin Samplawski, Alexander M. Berenbeim, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Susmit Jha, Ugur Kursuncu, Anirban Roy
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Beliefs and Behavior in Language Models

arXiv:2609.07943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There is significant uncertainty about whether abstractions like beliefs or desires usefully describe the behavior of large language models (LLMs). In...

By Alex Smolin, Bryan Wilder