arXiv AI

Outcome Monitors: Recovery Affordances for Silent Tool Failures

arXiv:2608. 19303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a tool call times out, the agent sees the failure and can route around it.

arXiv AI
Aug 14

Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues

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users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.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 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 Computation and Language
4d ago

Why Didn't It Check? Unsupported Final Claims and Their Repair in Two Tool-Equipped Language Models

The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.

By Justin Bronder
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

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.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Monitoring Agentic Systems Before They're Reliable

arXiv:2606. 02494v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic systems entering production typically operate as partially integrated assemblies where structural defects, not task-level errors, dominate the failure landscape.

By Marisa Ferrara Boston, Glen Hanson, Effi Georgala, JD Hudgens, Heather Frase