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:2609.14758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented language models are evaluated on whether they reach the right answer, not on whether they report honestly when a tool fails to supply...
arXiv:2607. 26117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-repair - returning a failed program to the model together with its test output and asking for a correction - is a standard component of code agents, and is almost always evaluated against a baseline that does not retry at all.
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.
arXiv:2608.25920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MASs) are increasingly applied to long-horizon complex tasks, their reliability has emerge...
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:2606. 07808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction.
arXiv:2607. 28871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a repair agent runs a test and sees it pass, the result is treated as evidence about the reported defect.
arXiv:2606. 25449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than having no memory at all.
arXiv:2606. 01416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents rely on orchestration layers that coordinate planning, retrieval, tool invocation, validation, memory, and recovery.
The paper reports a failure study of a production agentic software‑delivery platform, analyzing 147 incidents across 81 runs. It shows that the standard reliability primitives—retry, timeout, and error‑rate circuit breaking—fail in practice, leading to costly loops, false trips, and blocked work. The authors identify two cross‑cutting causes—identity adequacy and evidence adequacy—and propose seven new reliability primitives that enforce reliability at the delegation level.
Post-training quantization reduces the cost of deploying language-model agents, but its effect on recovery from temporary tool failures can depend on how recovery is evaluated. We compare 8-bit and 4-...
The paper investigates the reliability of language‑model judges used as measurement instruments on shared endpoints. Through two preregistered audits of 52,988 requests, the authors found that repeat rankings and byte‑identical replays fell far short of required thresholds, revealing significant instability. They identify three mechanisms—label‑to‑meaning bias, candidate gaps below the noise floor, and input permutation noise—that explain the gap, and propose a snapshot‑identity ladder, design rules, and a reporting checklist to mitigate such failures.