arXiv:2610.18614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling an acting LLM agent means deciding, at each step of a long-horizon task, whether to trust its next action, abstain, or hand off to a human....
arXiv:2606. 16432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User instructions are often underspecified because humans rely on implicit assumptions about the surrounding environment.
arXiv:2606. 09863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents can fail silently by asserting task completion when the environment state shows otherwise.
arXiv:2605. 17877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A significant hurdle for current LLMs is the execution of complex, multi-stage tasks.
The paper evaluates three approaches for emotion recognition in conversation— a low‑cost stacked ensemble, an off‑the‑shelf LLM prompt, and a confidence‑gated hybrid that escalates only uncertain ensemble predictions to the LLM. Across three datasets (IEMOCAP, MELD, CMU‑MOSI), the hybrid consistently outperforms each pure system, achieving higher weighted F1 scores while routing most traffic through the inexpensive ensemble. This results in significant cost savings (≈$10‑85 per million utterances) and provides an interpretable escalation signal tied to emotion or sentiment shifts.
The paper investigates a specific failure mode in vision‑language‑action models, termed instruction‑action binding, where models respond to language and vision separately but fail to combine them to select the correct action under counterfactual changes. Through behavioral analyses of fine‑tuned policies, the authors show that failed rollouts often preserve source behavior or switch to other demonstrated tasks, indicating that language is not ignored but mis‑bound. They propose Equivariant Counterfactual Training (ECT), which supplies counterfactual demonstrations and a paired loss to enforce correct action selection, achieving significant performance gains across simulated and real‑world benchmarks.
The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.
GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.
S3Gym is an interactive benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to self-improve through self-testing, self-judging, and self-improvement. It separates permissive exploration from strict held-out evaluation across seven text-based games with executable environment verifiers. Experiments show that self-improvement varies by task, with different experience incorporation pathways (direct history, summary memory, or parameter training) yielding mixed results and highlighting the need for agents to transform feedback into executable, transferable policies.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a production capability behind agent-assist prompts, escalation routing, and post-call analytics in contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, where co...
The paper presents a layered framework for evaluating conversational AI by aligning offline proxy signals with online A/B experiment outcomes. It introduces a three‑step alignment chain—behavioral label to product outcome, classifier to candidate behavior, and offline signal to experiment effect—alongside an audit protocol that compares confidence intervals and rankings. In a real‑world deployment, the composite proxy achieved 81.1% F1 versus 34.3% for the raw classifier, correctly predicting direction on all 113 contrasts and enabling efficient prioritization of candidate models before costly online testing.
arXiv:2608. 04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated.