DMAIC-Bench is a new benchmark that tests large‑language‑model agents on their ability to exercise self‑restraint—deciding when to continue, redirect, or stop a multi‑stage analytical task based on intermediate evidence. It contains 97 seeded tasks across 15 industrial cases in four sectors, with paired counterfactual variants that require opposite actions to distinguish warranted restraint from indiscriminate stopping. Evaluation involves a private scorer for execution traces and independent expert review, revealing that while agents often route correctly on GO decisions, they frequently act on invalid evidence at NO‑GO decisions, with a 47% average error rate. whyItMatters":"The benchmark provides a systematic way to measure whether agents can appropriately use evidence to control their own actions, a capability that current benchmarks largely overlook."
arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.
The paper introduces NAQD‑Env, a synthetic benchmark designed to test language agents’ ability to selectively withdraw and resume actions when new evidence, permissions, or stop instructions arise. It evaluates models against a deterministic reference policy across eleven dependency families, measuring policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. Experiments on 350 scenarios show low withdrawal recall, no valid resumption, and limited policy alignment, highlighting the need to treat selective withdrawal as a distinct reliability component.
The paper introduces a benchmark of 400 synthetic healthcare workflow episodes to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents’ reliability in escalating care when evidence is missing or conflicting. It finds that while clean decision accuracy is high (0.97), models miss a large proportion of necessary escalations (32–97%) under uncertainty, and even the largest 9.7B model’s performance drops to 0.78 in conflict scenarios. A workflow-aware controller improves utility and reduces missed escalations, but its effectiveness is limited by lexical generalization failures.
The paper introduces the twin‑prefix framework to evaluate how the size of the verification unit—i.e., how many actions a pre‑execution LLM monitor reviews in one call—affects its performance. By pairing each gold plan with a twin that differs by a single write and injecting a controlled error, the authors isolate the impact of review length on catch rates and false rejections. Their findings show that longer review windows increase rejection rates but do not improve discrimination, with the highest informedness occurring at one or two actions across all judges and domains.
arXiv:2608.23397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive clinical agents must gather decisive evidence and convert it into grounded actions under partial observability. A correct final diagnosis a...
The paper investigates how fine‑tuned language agents can selectively withdraw actions when evidence changes or authority is revoked. Using a synthetic NAQD‑Env environment, the authors compare an original curriculum with an enriched one across multiple system‑prompt framings and evaluate four LoRA checkpoints of Qwen2.5‑3B‑Instruct against instruction‑tuned baselines. Results show that fine‑tuned checkpoints achieve higher decision agreement and withdrawal recall, reduce incorrect withdrawals, and narrow prohibited combinations, though they also omit valid event reports and exhibit mixed preservation of authorized actions.
Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit. whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."
The paper introduces TRAILS, a taxonomy of 38 mechanisms that can compromise the reliability of large language model (LLM) read‑and‑evaluate tasks in evidence synthesis, such as study screening, data extraction, risk‑of‑bias assessment, and critical appraisal. It explains how these mechanisms can cause inconsistent or hidden failures across repeated LLM runs and outlines deployment settings, testing approaches, and mitigation strategies for each. The authors argue that repeatability or accuracy alone does not guarantee trustworthy judgments, emphasizing the need for human evaluation to verify that decisions are evidence‑based, free from external influence, and reproducible.
The paper investigates how personalized agents decide to use, ignore, update, or query retrieved user memory before acting on a task. An empirical audit protocol is developed to test structured intermediate outputs, revealing that while exposing state definitions improves accuracy, an explicit state-output field does not significantly enhance policy accuracy for large language models. The study also shows that example-level accuracy overstates consistency, with full four‑way family success being rare, and that providing benchmark‑associated state labels merely conditions predictions rather than proving internal fidelity.
OpenDiscoveryTrace is a public dataset of 558 complete AI scientific agent trajectories that records the reasoning process—thoughts, tool calls, observations, errors, revision triggers, and confidence—across 124 scientific tasks in drug discovery, materials science, genomics, and literature analysis. The dataset includes seven models (three frontier models and four open‑weight models) and 60 live‑retrieval variants, providing a balanced view of performance and error patterns. Pilot analysis shows that process traces reveal behavioral differences invisible to output‑only evaluation, such as differing error rates and types among frontier models.
arXiv:2607. 22165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based database agents show promise, but differing task scopes, testbeds, and metrics hinder comparison.
arXiv:2610.14146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon terminal benchmarks measure whether an agent can sustain progress through extended workflows with process rewards, not only whether its fi...