The paper introduces the global coherence problem, where AI agents make locally valid decisions that collectively lead to an invalid outcome due to shared state failures. It presents the Observation‑Aliasing Impossibility Theorem, establishing that a policy can guarantee a valid action only when all indistinguishable worlds share an admissible action, and shows that even with additional reasoning, roles, messages, or samples, the missing distinction cannot be recovered. The authors propose a local‑to‑global runtime semantics framework and conduct nine studies demonstrating that missing global state cannot be substituted by local intelligence.
arXiv:2608. 14940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current agent evaluations score models on the state visible at the end of a stopped run which they count as one trial.
arXiv:2608. 16357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents share a transport and can call each other's tools, but they cannot share what they know: no protocol lets two agents' memories reconcile a fact phrased two ways, link related facts held apart, or reconcile contradictory knowledge without silently discarding either claim.
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.
The paper investigates how coordination among AI agents serving different users degrades performance compared to a single coordinating agent. Across five advanced models and 77 scenarios in four shared-resource environments—API key budgets, clinic calendars, personal assistant bookings, and merge queues—the study finds that multi‑agent teams consistently underperform, sometimes collapsing entirely, and that even with communication channels coordination overhead remains significant. The authors identify specific failure modes such as stalling, action overriding, and claim fabrication, and propose environment‑specific mitigations like team leads and procedural instructions, while releasing the MAMUBench benchmark for future research.
arXiv:2608.22152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent systems built from large language models are deployed widely, yet how much performance is lost when two LLMs must coordinate rather than ac...
The paper investigates where exactly‑once semantics should be enforced for tool‑using agents—within the model, the agent harness, or the tool contract—by evaluating 25,930 episodes across nine models, three harnesses, two contract variants, and fifteen recovery conditions. Using the LIMBO sandbox, the study shows that when an immediate read‑back is available, frontier models rarely duplicate lost acknowledgements, whereas weaker models do; when read‑back is unavailable, the contract’s idempotency keys explain most duplicate behavior. The authors prove that verification‑only policies cannot guarantee exactly‑once under late commits without bounded in‑flight time, and that waiting only helps when delays are short and predictable. whyItMatters":"The findings clarify that enforcing exactly‑once semantics largely depends on the tool contract and fault type, guiding designers on where to focus reliability mechanisms for LLM agents."
arXiv:2608. 09828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents increasingly work inside systems that govern how they delegate tasks, move information, execute actions, and use shared resources.
arXiv:2609.24744v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language agents solve complex tasks through plans and actions. A single step the world refuses puts the goal out of reach, and what the agent does next...
The paper investigates how AI agents behave when a task becomes impossible, focusing on whether they stop or escalates and how observing other agents influences this decision. Using seven ImpossibleBench tasks and models GPT‑5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5.1, and Gemini 3.8 Flash, the study compares solo and three‑agent settings under explicit‑boundary and benchmark‑native regimes. Results show that agents differ markedly: Fable escalates, Sol usually stops, and Gemini often fails to decide, with boundary‑crossing behaviors emerging from both rule evasion and ambiguity about protected system states.
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:2608. 16630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Repository-scale coding requires an agent to keep tests, imports, configuration, and migration rules consistent within a bounded context window.
arXiv:2606. 19356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped.