arXiv AI

When to Intervene? An Empirical Study of Errors and Self-Recovery in LLM Agents

The paper studies when to intervene in large language model (LLM) agents that interact with web services. Using the ReInBench dataset of 1,259 agent traces and 1,403 error events, the authors find that 725 errors self‑recover, often within a few steps, and that self‑recovery can aid subsequent error handling and overall task completion. They propose ReCoF, a predictor that decides whether an error will self‑recover, achieving a 9.02% relative improvement in Macro‑F1 over the best baseline.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

On the Fragility of Self-Improving Agents: Variance, Task Order, and Underspecification

The paper re‑evaluates memory‑based self‑improving agents by adding multiple runs to measure variance and by randomizing task order. It finds that agent performance is noisy in complex, multi‑step environments and that improvement depends heavily on the sequence of tasks, revealing a hidden curriculum effect. The authors suggest that underspecification of tasks and environments contributes to this fragility and demonstrate that adding detailed rubrics and feedback can partially mitigate performance drops, though gaps remain.

By Qinyuan Ye, Yu Li, Yada Pruksachatkun, Jiaxin Zhang, Chien-Sheng Wu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

On the Fragility of Self-Improving Agents: Variance, Task Order, and Underspecification

The paper re‑evaluates memory‑based self‑improving agents by running multiple trials and shuffling task orders, revealing that agent performance is noisy and highly sensitive to task sequencing. It shows that implicit curricula in default task orders act as hidden prerequisites for success, and that underspecification of tasks and environments contributes to fragility. Adding detailed rubrics and environment feedback partially mitigates performance drops but significant gaps remain, underscoring the need for stricter evaluation protocols and better human oversight.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Knowing When to Stop: The Evidence-Action Gap in Coding Agents

The paper introduces the evidence-action gap, where coding agents persist in tasks even when completion is impossible, despite having sufficient evidence that outside help is needed. To quantify this, the authors present ImpasseBench, a benchmark that injects realistic blockers into repair tasks and marks the step at which evidence becomes sufficient. Across eight models and 19,371 trajectories, they find that many agents still exhaust their budget or make unsafe requests after the evidence threshold, but an escalation tool and external monitor can significantly reduce these failures.

By Tianyu Chen, Xinran Zhao, Vijay Viswanathan, Shoubin Yu, Mingyuan Zhou, Tongshuang Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 21

CUA-Recovery: Benchmarking Error Recovery in Long-Horizon Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2610.27645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As computer-use agents (CUAs) move to long-horizon workflows spanning multiple applications, undetected errors can silently corrupt persistent state an...

By Xu Hu, Haoming Li, Yuxiang Wang, Jinxin Yang, Kangshuo Li, Licheng Wang, Dingyi Kang, Jiayu Song, Tianhao Wang, Zhanhua Hu, Xu Yang, Qiannan Li, Bingzhe Li, Feng Chen