arXiv AI

Odds Law: The Decomposition Algebra On How Intelligence Organizes Itself to Solve Difficult Problems Reliably

arXiv:2606. 15712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask a structural question: given unreliable elementary problem-solvers, what organizations of them solve hard problems reliably, and what are the limits?

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Bounded Loops: Pre-Run Spend Bounds, Proved Termination, and Verified Completion for Agent Harnesses

The paper introduces a formal framework for agent harnesses that guarantees termination, prevents drift, and enforces spend limits through bounded loops, gates, and repair relations. It proves that these guarantees hold even with repair budgets and demonstrates the effectiveness of the system by identifying vacuous gates and achieving low false‑accept rates in a 69‑loop catalogue. The authors provide an instrumented implementation and a held‑out mutant corpus to validate gate correctness.

By Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap Bhardwaj
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Resist, Update, Reject: Preference Optimization Installs a Prior-Dependent Reliability Switch

The paper demonstrates that a preference‑optimization objective can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable sources by installing a prior‑dependent reliability switch. By training on data where a source’s stated reliability is paired with its answer, the model learns to flip its response only when the stated reliability exceeds a threshold that grows with the model’s prior. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct and Llama‑3.1‑8B show that this switch generalizes to unseen reliability values and follows stated reliability over role prestige, whereas supervised imitation fails to learn it.

By Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Agent Mesh: Reliability Primitives for Non-Idempotent Agent Delegation - Identity Adequacy and Evidence Adequacy

The paper reports a failure study of a production agentic software‑delivery platform, analyzing 147 incidents across 81 runs. It shows that the standard reliability primitives—retry, timeout, and error‑rate circuit breaking—fail in practice, leading to costly loops, false trips, and blocked work. The authors identify two cross‑cutting causes—identity adequacy and evidence adequacy—and propose seven new reliability primitives that enforce reliability at the delegation level.

By Mazhar Shaikh, Anurag Rajkumar Bombarde, Harshal Pathak