arXiv AI

Before Agents Decide: Epistemic Action in LLM-Based Systems

The paper discusses how large language model (LLM) agents can perform epistemic actions—actions that improve the evidence base before making a decision. It identifies three modes of such actions: acquiring missing evidence, transforming available evidence, and probing the system to generate revealing responses. The authors introduce the concept of epistemic scaffolding, referring to interfaces, tools, and environments that enable and audit these actions, arguing that agent design must explicitly address how decision-ready evidence is produced.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Do Web Agents Investigate Before They Decide?

The paper introduces MIRAGE, a benchmark of 750 multi‑step decision tasks designed to test autonomous web agents’ investigative abilities across Wikipedia Forensics, Shopping Admin adjudication, and Reddit Moderation. Each task contains a misleading visible context and a hidden context that holds decisive evidence, allowing performance to be broken down into Investigation, Reasoning, and Decision Accuracy, with an added Investigative Hallucination Rate. Evaluation of eight LLM agents reveals three consistent patterns: agents often reach relevant pages but fail to extract decisive evidence, procedural hints improve investigation but not decision accuracy on Wikipedia tasks, and 12.6% of trajectories include fabricated facts.

By Syed Nazmus Sakib, Nafiul Haque, Tapodhir Karmakar Taton, Shahrear Bin Amin, Shifat E. Arman
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Discoverable Agent Knowledge -- A Formal Framework for Agentic KG Affordances (Extended Version)

The paper proposes a four‑dimensional formal framework—Semantic Expressivity, Agentic Discoverability, Task‑Relative Grounding, and Epistemic Trust Scope—to extend current KG metadata standards (VoID and DCAT). It introduces the Agentic Affordance Profile (AAP), a semantic layer that enables agents to select, compose, and diagnose failures in knowledge graphs at planning time. A scholarly‑search example illustrates the framework and outlines a five‑point research agenda for scaling AAP‑based affordance matching.

By Terry R. Payne, Valentina Tamma, Enrico Daga
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Notes2Skills: From Lab Notebooks to Certainty-Aware Scientific Agent Skills

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level.

arXiv AI
5d ago

Accurate but Not Humble: Evaluating Epistemic Humility in LLM Agents under Knowledge Conflict

The paper introduces a new evaluation for large language model agents called epistemic humility (EH), which measures an agent’s ability to recognize, act on, and communicate uncertainty when evidence conflicts with prior beliefs. EH is operationalized through three trajectory-level behaviors—Identify, Solve, and Escalate (ISE)—and tested in both controlled and naturally occurring knowledge conflict scenarios. Results show that higher task accuracy does not guarantee greater epistemic humility, and that model-level interventions can improve EH but often reduce accuracy, indicating that humility depends on the interplay between the backbone model, agent harness, and environment.

By Kaiser Sun, Bernal Jimenez Gutierrez, Hongjun Liu, Jingyu Zhang, Jie Gao, Mark Dredze, Daniel Khashabi