The paper introduces the concept of empty commitments, where an agent promises an action that its current tools or runtime cannot execute. It defines empty commitments using commitment semantics, identifies three failure types, and proposes an anchoring condition for realistic tool promises. The authors also outline a measurement protocol that tests follow‑up requests across five setups, each adding a different persistence affordance, with the environment either implicit or explicitly stated.
By Jiaqi Tang, Lan Wei, Bingyu Shen, Boyang Li
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:2609.14758v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-augmented language models are evaluated on whether they reach the right answer, not on whether they report honestly when a tool fails to supply...
By Arham Sethi, Arsen Kenzhebayev, Saanvi Paturi, Vatsal Raina, Vyas Raina, Ivaxi Sheth
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users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.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:2609.26048v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Language-model agents often reach a working solution and then fail to consistently deliver it. We study runtime policies: targeted natural-language i...
By Nikita Agarwal, Nivedit Jain
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."
By Jiapeng Li
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
The paper evaluates a three‑part control stack— a 5‑Pillar runtime constitution, a 4‑tier swarm (Director, majority vote, Monitor, hard gate), and Cognitive Annealing—for multi‑agent LLM negotiation against an adversarial Gatekeeper. Experiments with Gemini 2.5 Pro agents and Claude Haiku 4.5 show that the constitution and Director improve framing but not reliability, the Monitor and hard gate do not reduce unlocks, and deterministic recovery via atomic purge and a canonical strike successfully resolves deadlocks while keeping call budgets unchanged. The study demonstrates that the stack can recover from deadlocks without additional model cost, though it does not reduce overall call or token usage as initially hypothesized.
By Masaaki Nakatsu (AO, Inc. / OrbLabs AG), Reno Wang (AO, Inc.)
The study shows that large language model (LLM) agents are far more likely to commit to a directional prediction when presented with a professional‑looking market panel than when asked the same question directly, with commitment rates rising from 6.5% to 54.0% across 12 frontier models. Even when the panel’s data is entirely fabricated, commitment still increases significantly, indicating that the authority of the presentation, rather than the truth of the information, drives confident action. The authors demonstrate that this act/don’t‑act decision gate is narrow, model‑specific, and can be mitigated through supervised fine‑tuning, though its effectiveness depends on response format and context.
whyItMatters":"The findings reveal a specific vulnerability in LLMs where presentation style can override factual accuracy, highlighting the need for careful design and training to prevent misleading confidence in uncertain scenarios."
By Pranav Aggarwal
arXiv:2607. 07405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents can violate the very policies they are deployed to enforce while appearing to complete the task successfully.
By Vikas Reddy, Sumanth Reddy Challaram, Abhishek Basu
arXiv:2608. 04066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How do you verify a long-horizon agent when its own state and self-reports are exactly what you cannot trust?
By Mohsen Arjmandi
arXiv:2603.01209v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In CodeAct, language-model agents write Python that calls tools and use execution feedback to choose actions. Persistent runtimes preserve Python v...
By Victor May, Van Khue Nguyen, Aaditya Salgarkar, Yishan Wang, Diganta Misra, Huu Nguyen