arXiv AI

When Should a World Model Move? Loss-Conditioned State Execution

The paper introduces loss‑conditioned state execution, a model‑agnostic technique that decides whether to apply a world model’s proposed state change or keep the current state based on whether the change reduces downstream loss. It formalizes state movability as the existence of a loss‑reducing feasible correction and constructs loss‑specific proposals from predictive distributions, executing them only when a groupwise lower confidence bound on loss improvement is positive. Experiments on forecasting and dynamics benchmarks show that the method accepts updates for a subset of cases, achieving lower bounded loss than persistence or always executing the proposal, and highlights that event predictability and loss‑based decisions must be evaluated separately.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

Knowing When to Ask for Help: Bayesian Self-Escalation in Hierarchical LLM Agents

The paper introduces a Bayesian self‑escalation strategy for hierarchical large‑language‑model agents, allowing an agent to detect during its own reasoning that it is unlikely to succeed and hand control over to a stronger model. The authors formalise this as an optimal‑stopping problem over a learned competence posterior, derive a myopic escalation threshold, and prove that the optimal policy is a time‑varying threshold without assumptions on the raw signal. They provide theoretical guarantees—including a 1/√n regret decay with n calibration trajectories—and validate the approach in simulations and a real‑model code‑generation cascade, showing that the escalation frontier outperforms post‑hoc routing at equal cost. whyItMatters":"The study offers a principled, theoretically grounded method for agents to dynamically decide when to seek stronger models, potentially improving efficiency and reliability in hierarchical LLM systems."

By Nadeem Shaikh
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Available Guardrails: Certifying Selective Prediction across ML Systems

The paper introduces a method to certify selective prediction in machine learning systems by computing the availability of safety gates through exact-binomial inversion and dynamic programming. It demonstrates that a truth-informed planner can significantly improve mean coverage over naive approaches, and that reallocating error budgets further enhances coverage across diverse applications such as LLM tool‑calling, content moderation, lesion classification, and recommendation. The study highlights the importance of planning and finite‑sample estimation in ensuring reliable, granular deployment of selective predictors.

By Parivesh Priye, Yufeng Wang, Haibin Ling, Michael Chaykowsky
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

A Control Theory of Predictability in Latent World Models

arXiv:2607. 10362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models are trained to predict future states in a learned representation and are then deployed inside a planner that selects actions by simulating them forward.

By Hanzhe You, Yonggang Zhang, Maohao Ran, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Wei Xue, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo