arXiv Computation and Language

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Actions with Receipts: Jointly Binding Claims, Evidence, and Execution for Replayable Tool-Agent Auditing

The paper introduces a claim‑anchored execution contract that binds a tool‑using agent’s emitted claim to its exact source span, the ordered execution prefix that produced it, and the source version and access state observed. Each receipt contains deterministic anchors, source identifiers, offsets, hashes, quotes, and a domain‑separated execution commitment, allowing a verifier to reconstruct these bindings before semantic or task labels are joined. The contract defines seven independently testable properties and demonstrates high detection rates against cross‑object attacks, with strong performance on conflict‑aware support guard evaluations.

By Miaobo Hu, Shuhao Hu, Xiaobo Guo, Xin Wang, Bokun Wang, Yina Sa, Daren Zha, Jun Xiao
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Invocation-Level Reliability of Tool-Using Agents

The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.

By Afiya Noorain, Subhranshu Mohanty, Amritesh Banerjee, Abhijit Dasgupta
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Verify Claims, Not Scores: Evidence-Based Verification of Modular Agents

The paper proposes a claim‑specific verification audit for modular agents that replaces aggregate task scores with evidence‑based evaluations. Each agent conclusion is recorded with supporting evidence and classified as supported, unsupported, unresolved, or not evaluated, along with the boundary of validity. The audit employs three tools—oracle policies, perfect component replacements, and verifier‑score tests—to trace value changes, locate lost value, and assess verifier effectiveness, demonstrated on a portfolio‑allocation agent in a synthetic market.

By Ali Atiah Alzahrani
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

When a Data Artifact Isn't a Shortcut: Causal Auditing of Synthetic RLVR Corpora

The paper audits whether synthetic distractors in RLVR corpora act as shortcuts for learning policies. A classifier using only surface statistics barely outperforms chance, and manual inspection reveals that code distractors are almost identical to correct answers. Experiments with a paraphrase‑matched control show no exploitation advantage for the unmodified data, indicating that the detectable artifact was not used by the policy.

By Esther Xin