arXiv AI

When "Must" Becomes "Maybe": Erosion of Workflow Constraints in LLM Agent Handoffs

arXiv AI
Aug 26

When "Must" Becomes "Maybe": Constraint Weakening in LLM Agent Workflows

Large language model agents coordinate tasks via multi‑role, multi‑stage workflows that transform upstream state into intermediate artifacts such as summaries and plans. The study shows that when these artifacts are transformed—through compression, plan assimilation, or other handoff methods—the strict action‑binding constraints on upstream state can be weakened, turning mandatory requirements into optional information. In 1,296 synthetic episodes, direct handoff preserved all safety blockers, whereas transformed handoffs frequently deactivated or forbidden actions, but restoring full state fields or applying downstream verification can recover preservation.

By Yiheng Sun, Huifei Wang, Yancheng Zhu, Zhenyu Li, Zebin Zhao, Yifan Yuan
arXiv AI
Sep 2

REVISE: Validity-Guided Recovery for Online Revisions in Agent Workflows

The paper introduces “Revise”, a runtime system that performs validity-guided, fine-grained recovery for online revisions in structured agent workflows. When a revision arrives, Revise intersects the change with recorded data and control dependencies, propagates the impact through the partially executed DAG, stops invalid work, preserves unaffected progress, and recomputes only the affected region. Experiments on real coding‑agent traces and LangGraph/LLMCompiler applications show that Revise matches a latest‑version oracle, reduces model calls by up to 56%, and improves service‑level objective goodput under load.

By Ruoling Qi, Xuaner Wu, Penghang Liu, Jian Chen, Yirui Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

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.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues

arXiv:2608. 12599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.

By Haoyuan Zhu
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