arXiv AI

Not Self-Decidable: LLMs Cannot Draw the Boundary of What an Agent Verifier Can Check

arXiv AI
Sep 3

LLM-as-a-Judge Is Not an Oracle: Why Self-Improving Agents Need Deterministic Guardrails

The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.

By Vansh Wahi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

One Axis, No Brake: Self-Knowledge Limits the Filtering of Harmful Peer Conformity in LLMs

The paper investigates how multi‑agent large language models (LLMs) can correct each other’s mistakes, but also how peer pressure can overturn correct answers. It argues that a safeguard— a ‘brake’ that blocks harmful revisions while allowing beneficial ones— is essentially a correctness probe, and that models’ self‑knowledge (measured by AUROC 0.64–0.89) limits the effectiveness of such a brake. The authors find that even white‑box steering cannot break this ceiling, and that adding information before revision, rather than filtering after, is the more promising approach.

By Yibo Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Quipu: A Governed Bitemporal Knowledge Graph Store

arXiv:2608. 16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents now write knowledge graphs, but knowledge-graph stores still carry defaults set when humans curated them: accept writes now and clean later, keep one time axis or none, treat every writer's facts as equally trustworthy, and leave governance to dashboards and middleware.

By Steve Brown
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Who Verifies the Verifier? Co-Evolving Inspectable Graders with Self-Improving Agents

The paper introduces a method for co-evolving inspectable verifiers alongside self-improving agents. By synthesizing verifiers from clustered failures and selecting them based on agreement with a reference set, the authors demonstrate improved held‑out agreement on MBPP+ and outperform a bare LLM judge. They also show that removing anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous grader, yet the collapsed verifier still trains skills effectively, indicating that downstream task scores cannot certify a self‑evolved verifier.

By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
arXiv AI
Oct 9

The Harness as the Only Mutable Surface: Compliance-Bounded Self-Evolution of LLM Agents in Credit Pipelines, with a Measured Admission Gate

The paper proposes that self‑evolving large‑language‑model agents can only be safely reviewed if their changes are confined to the runtime harness—instruction text, tool‑call logic, and primitive composition—while the model weights remain fixed. A dual‑loop engine with an admission gate records a hash‑chained diff before deployment, and simulation experiments show that this gate admits only safe changes, preventing error increases and maintaining false‑positive rates. When the gate is removed, many harmful changes slip through and missed flags rise, illustrating the gate’s protective role.

By Ravil Akhtyamov