arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.
arXiv:2606. 15621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes.
arXiv:2606. 08275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When an LLM agent fails -- issues a refund it should not have, calls the wrong tool, leaks data -- existing tooling answers what happened (observability) or whether it passed (evaluation), but not which step caused the failure.
arXiv:2608. 09263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Outcome verifiers score completed reasoning traces but do not assign credit to intermediate tokens.
arXiv:2607. 12985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged.
arXiv:2607. 11607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributional reinforcement learning agents learn full return distributions that are increasingly read at face value: for interpretability, risk-sensitive control, and safety monitoring.
SkillGate is a method that trains agents to select the correct skill from a large slate during an episode by separating credit signals for skill selection and execution. It addresses the problem of selector credit starvation, where traditional outcome-rewarded RL fails to give sufficient credit to the skill-naming tokens, especially in long-horizon tasks. Experiments on five benchmarks show that SkillGate improves a 9B policy’s success rate from 40.8% to 53.2%, reduces exposure to misleading candidates, and requires fewer skill reads.
Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).
arXiv:2608. 15286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce AgentRelBench, an environment-agnostic reliability instrument that computes ground-truth, severity-priced damage from database state diffs across repeated runs, with no LLM in the measurement path, demonstrated on EnterpriseOps-Gym.
arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.
arXiv:2608. 08126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Credit scoring increasingly relies on models whose decision logic cannot be read off their parameters, in tension with supervisory expectations that adverse decisions be explainable.
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
arXiv:2607. 04419v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When evaluator-derived step rewards are pooled or compared across scoring channels, their sign is treated as transportable.