From Confident Closing to Silent Failure: Characterizing False Success in LLM Agents
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
arXiv:2608. 02464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents fail mid-episode -- they loop, cascade tool errors, drift off goal, fabricate results, or silently absorb corrupted content -- and the standard remedy, judging every step with a second LLM, costs more than the agent itself.
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
arXiv:2608. 14680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliability in LLM-based agentic systems is a property of the whole execution (its tool calls, model calls, guardrails, and inter-agent messages), not of the final answer alone, yet evaluating only task outcomes reveals little about how or why a run fails.
arXiv:2608. 03222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates.
Software engineering (SWE) agents resolve repository-level issues through long trajectories that grow increasingly expensive as context accumulates. Failed runs tend to be longer and exhibit redundant exploration or looping, suggesting that some failures may be detectable before completion.
arXiv:2606. 19356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped.
arXiv:2608. 15286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce AgentRelBench, an environment-agnostic reliability instrument that computes ground-truth, severity-priced damage from database state diffs across repeated runs, with no LLM in the measurement path, demonstrated on EnterpriseOps-Gym.
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
arXiv:2607. 26313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic systems act, so a defect in the evidence they retrieve becomes a wrong action with a currency cost.
arXiv:2608. 08239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM routers promise efficiency by matching each request to the cheapest adequate model, and are increasingly applied per step inside multi-step agents.
arXiv:2608. 02786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can fail silently.
arXiv:2606. 10241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history.
arXiv:2606. 00329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recursive systems can enter collapse-like regimes -- self-reinforcing amplification, persistent recursion, and narrowing diversity that mask accelerating internal degradation -- before overt failure becomes visible.