arXiv Machine Learning

Impact Is Not Invalidation: Ask About the Claim, Not the Diff

The paper investigates how machine‑learning models can determine whether a claim (a test assertion) remains valid after a code change. It compares two questioning strategies: asking whether a diff preserves behavior versus asking whether a specific claim still holds. The authors find that the latter approach yields far higher precision (up to 0.974) across models of varying cost, while the former performs poorly (precision 0.291–0.329). They also benchmark against a regression‑test selector, showing that even near‑complete knowledge of a change’s reach does not reliably identify falsified claims. The study is grounded in 10,369 mined claims with 184 execution‑verified flips from 23 Python libraries.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Why Didn't It Check? Unsupported Final Claims and Their Repair in Two Tool-Equipped Language Models

The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.

By Justin Bronder
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.

By Guodong Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
2d ago

Actions with Receipts: Jointly Binding Claims, Evidence, and Execution for Replayable Tool-Agent Auditing

The paper introduces a claim‑anchored execution contract that binds a tool‑using agent’s emitted claim to its exact source span, the ordered execution prefix that produced it, and the source version and access state observed. Each receipt contains deterministic anchors, source identifiers, offsets, hashes, quotes, and a domain‑separated execution commitment, allowing a verifier to reconstruct these bindings before semantic or task labels are joined. The contract defines seven independently testable properties and demonstrates high detection rates against cross‑object attacks, with strong performance on conflict‑aware support guard evaluations.

By Miaobo Hu, Shuhao Hu, Xiaobo Guo, Xin Wang, Bokun Wang, Yina Sa, Daren Zha, Jun Xiao
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Temporal Validity on Real Software Histories: Eliminating Stale-Fact Errors in Code-Assistant Memory over GitHub Fixes

The paper evaluates a deterministic supersession memory, MemStrata, for retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems on real software history. Using 707 GitHub issues, the authors extracted 130 clean atomic state transitions where a single value changes from pre‑fix to post‑fix. MemStrata achieved 0.91 answer accuracy versus 0.57–0.59 for standard RAG, eliminating stale‑fact errors that RAG returned 36–38% of the time, while maintaining comparable retrieval latency.

By Neeraj Yadav
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Hierarchical Certified Semantic Commitment for Byzantine-Resilient LLM-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606. 07316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Byzantine collaboration among large-language-model agents requires a finality-control primitive: given delivered stochastic, structured natural-language proposals, the protocol must decide whether the round supports a commit, what kind of commit, or a typed safe abort.

By Haoran Xu, Lei Zhang, Iadh Ounis, Xianbin Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

MoM: Memory of Memory

arXiv:2609.25054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a long-horizon LLM agent, the memory question is not what was once recorded but what \emph{currently holds}. Most designs answer it only indirectly...

By Bowen Qin, Yao Lu