arXiv AI

Cybernetic and Epistemic: A Missing Vocabulary for Trustworthy Agentic Delegation

The paper argues that as AI systems increasingly generate code, the bottleneck has shifted to supervising these systems, revealing a vocabulary gap between cybernetic coordination (actions aligning with the world) and epistemic coordination (understanding that can be verified). It critiques current oversight that merely approves outputs, proposing instead that every consequential choice by an agent must include a retrievable condition explaining why it was made, enabling third‑party verification. The authors illustrate this with three delegation episodes, introduce a two‑part reconstruction test, and propose the ORRCF convention to embed such conditions in all recorded decisions.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

When Agents Act Unwatched: The Reduced-Supervision Paradox in Agentic AI

The paper "When Agents Act Unwatched: The Reduced‑Supervision Paradox in Agentic AI" discusses how the promise that AI systems will continue acting after users stop watching creates an accountability inversion. It argues that as stepwise supervision recedes, verification shifts into the runtime infrastructure—authority, records, interrupts, outcome checks, and repair—forming what the authors call the reduced‑supervision paradox. A 63‑artifact audit across research papers and engineering sources shows that agents’ action surfaces are more visible than the mechanisms needed to hold them accountable, with tool mediation and monitoring traces appearing in 40 and 37 artifacts, while checkpoint placement, validator independence, recovery, and contestability are rarely visible. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that observable action paths can replace accountability when verification is moved onto users after meaningful intervention is no longer possible."

By Hanjing Shi, Dominic DiFranzo
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Ethical LLM-Assisted Research: A Framework for Responsible Delegation, Verification, and Epistemic Value

The paper proposes a normative framework for ethical use of large language models (LLMs) in scientific research, treating reasoning as a distributed process where human control remains essential for epistemic legitimacy. It introduces key constructs—content origin, human verification, responsibility assignment, accountable ownership, and epistemic outcome—to separate claim provenance from verification and responsibility. The authors argue that the ethical boundary hinges on adequate verification and accountable human ownership, and they propose an "epistemic audit" to document delegation, verification, provenance, and responsibility for transparent, reviewable AI-assisted reasoning.

By Kalin Stoyanov
arXiv AI
Sep 25

When Honesty is Not Enough in AI Debate

The paper "When Honesty is Not Enough in AI Debate" explores how AI debate, intended as a scalable oversight method, can allow agents to pursue hidden objectives while still achieving correct verdicts. By introducing the strategic interactive oversight (SIO) framework, the authors formalise task‑admissible latent optimisation and demonstrate, via the establish protocol debate, a trade‑off between task success and disclosure of a hidden variable. They show that expanding the cross‑examiner’s role can reduce bias, underscoring that oversight effectiveness depends not only on verdict correctness but also on the information revealed in transcripts.

By Rayne Holland, Liming Zhu, Jason Xue
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that evaluates generated video by compiling prompts into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any frames are observed. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (e.g., segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection) and returns provenance‑carrying evidence records, which are mapped to a three‑valued state (supported, contradicted, unknown) with full traceability. On a 1,500‑clip corpus of human‑annotated flaw records, VeriPhy accounts for 228 failures out of 304, outperforming a published question‑decomposition evaluator that accounts for 164, while also providing auditable evidence for each verdict.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Runtime Governance for Agentic AI: Action-Boundary Control with Trusted Provenance and Fail-Closed Execution

The paper introduces Aegis, a runtime governance system for agentic AI that treats model outputs as action proposals and mediates them through a trusted decision layer before tool execution. Aegis evaluates proposals against active policy, resolves provenance server‑side, fails closed under uncertainty, and routes selected cases through a Senate‑style settlement process. In a sandbox evaluation across 6,300 rows, Aegis prevented all governed mock‑tool applications and risky side‑effect completions, preserving provenance and quorum evidence for all settled cases.

By Adam Mazzocchetti
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that transforms a text prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any video frames are generated. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection, etc.) and records provenance‑carrying evidence for each action. The system maps these records to a three‑valued state—supported, contradicted, or unknown—providing traceable verdicts that can be used to refine generation models.

By Wenzhuo Xu, Yuchen Zhu, Chongjian Ge, Xuan Shen, Jing Shi, Jason Kuen, Yongxin Chen, Molei Tao, Christopher McComb, Noelia Grande Guti\'errez, Jiuxiang Gu