arXiv:2606. 15390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone.
The paper treats human interventions during LLM agent failures as labels that pinpoint the internal computation that went wrong, rather than merely training data. In a controlled environment, the authors analyze one failure type—over‑asking a clarifying question when the request is already clear—using rule‑based overseer labels validated by blind human judgment. They find that the decision to ask versus act can be causally localized across several models, that over‑asking exhibits distinct mechanistic signatures, and that steering or weight consolidation can mitigate the issue, though outcomes vary by model family.
The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.
arXiv:2608. 14808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a user question is underspecified, a capable model should recognize that its context is insufficient, identify the missing information, ask for it, and respond only once that information determines a unique answer.
arXiv:2609.07944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing causal-inference benchmarks for LLMs mostly score method descriptions or whether generated code runs, not whether the executed workflow recove...
arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.
arXiv:2606. 09092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) is a must-acquire skill for modern foundation model systems to operate effectively and safely in the real world.
arXiv:2606. 15349v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized examinations are typically treated as uniform syllabus coverage problems.
arXiv:2607. 14552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A standard recipe for distilling the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is to sample chains of thought from the model, keep those that reach the correct final answer, and fine-tune on the survivors.
The paper investigates ‘thinking leakage’ in post‑training hybrid reasoning models that operate in NoThink mode. Using a causal mediation framework and bidirectional interventions, the authors show that the performance gains attributed to NoThink training largely stem from the model drifting toward its Think mode. Across three models and three training methods on competition math benchmarks, leakage ratios between 42% and 79% were observed, indicating that much of the accuracy improvement is due to re‑invoking existing Think behavior rather than genuine NoThink capability.
arXiv:2404.06349v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to understand causality significantly impacts the competence of large language models (LLMs) in output explanation and counterfactual r...
arXiv:2609.06941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal effect estimation asks how an outcome would change under an intervention, and medicine, economics, and public policy all treat it as a foundatio...