arXiv AI

Refuse, Decompose, Refresh: A Claim-Safe Protocol for Closed-Loop AI Evaluation

The paper introduces a claim‑safe protocol for evaluating closed‑loop AI systems, consisting of three actions: Refuse, Decompose, and Refresh. It demonstrates the protocol in a simulator with 24 policy components and 1,440 held‑out cases, showing that abstention and stable false admission rates are low while providing detailed statistical diagnostics. The approach emphasizes that evaluation results should be tied to observable support and statistical calibration rather than a single PASS/FAIL label.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Real-Time Detection and Repair of LLM Agent Failures

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.

By Sunny Dubey
arXiv AI
1d ago

A Verifier Can Leak the Answer: Diagnosability Before Optimization in Closed-Loop Agent Debugging

The paper demonstrates that a verifier used in closed‑loop agent debugging can inadvertently reveal the answer it is meant to test, rendering solver comparisons meaningless. In a study of 12 development cases, both exact minimum hitting set and a greedy method returned identical supports, and an audit showed that exact‑anchor predicates always produced the planted fault pair. The authors propose a support‑gated verification contract that requires a clean reference map and runtime evidence before an independently calibrated signal can confirm a detection, and validate this approach on 1,440 held‑out cases with a low false‑admission rate.

By Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

More Rejective, Not More Discriminative: The Unit of Verification in Pre-Execution LLM Oversight

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.

By Yuchen Han, Cheng Yan, Wuyang Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

CURA: Certified Runtime Alarms for Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2608.27808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-report is the cheapest oversight channel a deployer has, and on capable computer-use agents (CUAs) it fails precisely where oversight matters. O...

By Divake Kumar, Sina Tayebati, Devashri Naik, Amanda Sofie Rios, Nilesh Ahuja, Omesh Tickoo, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi
arXiv AI
Aug 18

When Agentic Executions Fail: Detecting and Localizing Runtime Faults from Telemetry

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.

By Chenkai Zhang, Yiran Li, Yifang Tian, Michalis Bachras, Hans-Arno Jacobsen