From Confident Closing to Silent Failure: Characterizing False Success in LLM Agents
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
arXiv:2605. 08747v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard embodied evaluations do not independently score whether an agent correctly commits to task completion at episode closure, a capacity we call terminal commitment.
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
arXiv:2606. 11688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified.
Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion.
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. 03222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates.
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
arXiv:2607. 19749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-based reinforcement-learning agents of the DreamerV3 family forget catastrophically when trained on task sequences, even when an unbounded replay buffer preserves every earlier experience.
Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance.
arXiv:2606. 08542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploratory manipulation often turns an apparent failed attempt into the key evidence for what to do next.
arXiv:2607. 16247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have empowered embodied agents to execute complex household tasks, they struggle to proactively handle dynamically emerging hazards during closed-loop interactions.
arXiv:2607. 27283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon benchmarks often show that agents fail more as tasks become longer.
arXiv:2607. 25152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running autonomous agents plan, act, and judge their own completion without human intervention.