arXiv Computation and Language

Decoupling Logic from Persona: Structural Immunity of Edge LLM Agents to Context Pollution

arXiv AI
Aug 25

Right-Sizing LLM-Agent Decomposition in VAT Determination: A Pilot Controlled Sweep

The study evaluates how to best split tasks among large‑language‑model agents for cross‑border VAT determination, comparing one broad agent to configurations ranging from one to five narrow agents. Across 4,400 runs—including token‑matched and failure‑injection scenarios—the intermediate configurations achieved the highest accuracy but did not surpass the fine‑endpoint benchmark, leaving the optimal decomposition hypothesis unconfirmed. The pilot provides a preregistered heuristic for right‑sizing decomposition, along with an oracle, dataset, and analysis pipeline.

By Pedro Santos
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Our Own Jev: Typed Decisions in One Forward Pass, from an In-House Judge to Open LoRA Models

arXiv:2610. 29052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A typed decision maps evidence, a question and a fixed set of options to a probability for every option, computed in one forward pass, by reading a language model's logits or a small head over its hidden states, instead of generating and parsing text.

By Yuchuan Weng, Chi Liu, Xin Chen, Srinivasan Manoharan
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Agentic Context Management for Multi-Turn Human-AI Conversations

The paper introduces Agentic Conversation Context Curation (AC3), a training‑free method that cleans multi‑turn human‑AI dialogue by consolidating the user’s task specification, auditing assistant outputs, and editing the context to remove or rebuild assistant turns. AC3 outperforms both full context and assistant‑omission (AO) baselines on several benchmark tasks, closing a significant portion of the performance gap and receiving preference from a GPT‑5‑mini judge on real WildChat conversations. The study also shows that context pollution is contagious and that simply ignoring assistant turns can worsen performance, underscoring the need for structured removal of assistant content.

By Matthew Ho, Chenglong Wang, Baolin Peng, Nebojsa Jojic, Philippe Laban, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, Lianhui Qin
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Interface-Induced Trajectory Censoring

The paper reports that agent evaluations often show a tool‑call rate of zero even when the model emits valid calls, because the interface censors the trajectory before downstream components see it. Experiments on BFCL v4 and tau‑bench demonstrate that swapping the serving adapter can change the observed call rate from 0.00 to 0.96/0.19 or from 0 to 636 calls, indicating that the interface—not the model—causes the discrepancy. A 98‑line preflight check is released to detect such silent failures, highlighting that tool‑call rates depend on the model‑interface stack rather than the model alone.

By Wenbo Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

AgentDiff: Meaning-Bearing Rewrites Trigger Deeper Divergence than Presentation Changes in LLM Agents

The paper introduces AgentDiff, a metric that quantifies how much LLM agents’ answers differ when inputs are altered by meaning‑bearing rewrites (paraphrases, synonym substitutions) versus presentation changes (reordering, formatting, distractors). Across 68 model–benchmark–scaffold combinations involving ten LLMs and over 1,500 questions, meaning‑bearing rewrites consistently produce a roughly 20‑percentage‑point higher inconsistency rate than presentation changes, a gap that persists across severity proxies and remains significant even outside the Qwen family. Trace analysis reveals that meaning‑bearing rewrites preserve the first action but reduce thought similarity from the second step onward, extending the divergence cascade—a phenomenon termed “stealth divergence.”

By Liyun Zhang, Jiayi Guo