The paper introduces an acceptance protocol for sensor-coordinate and polarity binding in mechatronic commissioning, separating candidate generation from release authority. It routes unsupported requirements to a frozen four‑billion‑parameter local language model and only releases plans when both facts can be derived by an external gate under a sealed grammar, with a gold‑standard user providing a canonical answer when eligible. Evaluation on 144 tasks showed that fabricated plans were correctly rejected, no false releases occurred among 83 releases, and protection against incorrect user answers was characterized across 431 pairings.
The paper argues that large language model agents should not be the sole authority on whether they have satisfied a task. It identifies two gaps—understanding–execution and state–authority—where agents may claim completion without actually meeting the specification. The authors propose SpecHarness, a framework that separates agent proposals from authoritative state by requiring evidence from qualified providers to confirm compliance, and demonstrate its effectiveness on guideline‑following and artifact‑generation tasks.
By Haiqing Li, Xin Ma, Yinhao Wu, Wenliang Zhong, Feng Jiang, Thao M. Dang, Xiao Hu, Hehuan Ma, Yuzhi Guo, Junzhou Huang
arXiv:2609.26048v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Language-model agents often reach a working solution and then fail to consistently deliver it. We study runtime policies: targeted natural-language i...
By Nikita Agarwal, Nivedit Jain
The paper introduces NAQD‑Env, a synthetic benchmark designed to test language agents’ ability to selectively withdraw and resume actions when new evidence, permissions, or stop instructions arise. It evaluates models against a deterministic reference policy across eleven dependency families, measuring policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. Experiments on 350 scenarios show low withdrawal recall, no valid resumption, and limited policy alignment, highlighting the need to treat selective withdrawal as a distinct reliability component.
By Mohamed Abouzahra
Praxa is an evidence‑bound harness for governed AI agent execution that explicitly represents states such as proposal, authority, dispatch, verified external effect, and promotion through deterministic admission, brokered execution, external read‑back, reconciliation, and reviewed promotion. The authors report four evidence lanes: a repository‑local audit passing all unit and Workerd tests; a pilot on 12 curated tasks where both baseline and reliability‑layer arms passed 17 of 36 trials; a coordination‑proxy comparison where both baseline and a source‑authored candidate completed all 180 trials with equal accuracy but the candidate used fewer tokens and steps; and deployed source/configuration evidence showing bounded reflection, recall accounting, memory compilation, and tool‑health paths. None of the evidence demonstrates superiority in security, safety, or user benefit.
whyItMatters:"Praxa provides a testable architecture that makes authority‑to‑effect transitions explicit, offering a framework for verifying AI agent behavior, though current evidence does not prove improved security or performance."
By Stefan G. Creadore
arXiv:2607. 19449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluation frameworks for tool-augmented LLM agents focus overwhelmingly on capability metrics or explicit tool crashes, leaving silent infrastructure failures and HTTP 200 responses with empty, null, or malformed payloads largely unaudited.
By Aarushi Singh
The paper audits a developer‑accessible on‑device language model, revealing that it can confidently produce incorrect answers while refusing benign prompts, a phenomenon termed task‑asymmetric miscalibration. The model’s confident outputs are surface‑indistinguishable, with classifiers based on user‑visible features failing to separate correct from wrong responses. The authors propose a model‑agnostic audit protocol, a surface‑indistinguishability test, and a black‑box consistency wrapper that improves reliability without requiring model access.
By Shashwat Pandey, Satwik Pandey, Suresh Raghu
The paper introduces a framework for evaluating how large language model agents revise their success criteria after failures, defining five non‑compensatory conditions that must be met for a criterion revision to be considered valid. Using the CMB‑0.1 protocol, the authors test twelve cross‑domain scenarios across four system configurations, finding that no model trial satisfies all five conditions and highlighting specific failure modes such as zero‑state reconstruction and inadequate intervention sensitivity. They propose a more stringent trace‑anchored CMB‑0.4 protocol to better isolate and measure criterion revision in future studies.
By Guodong Xu
arXiv:2606. 02965v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models gain tool access and are deployed as autonomous agents capable of editing records, executing transactions, and modifying infrastructure, we still evaluate them based on the sole metric of task completion.
By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
arXiv:2609.14758v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-augmented language models are evaluated on whether they reach the right answer, not on whether they report honestly when a tool fails to supply...
By Arham Sethi, Arsen Kenzhebayev, Saanvi Paturi, Vatsal Raina, Vyas Raina, Ivaxi Sheth
arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.
By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
The paper introduces a disclosure‑gated user simulator for companion‑agent evaluation, where information release is conditioned on the agent’s behavior through a five‑level gate system. The authors train the simulator on synthetic and real data, audit its performance, and demonstrate that it preserves ranking order and score stability across 12 tested systems. Their released simulator achieves a 0.993 correlation with the original benchmark’s simulator and outperforms prompting a frontier model, which only shifts scores upward without affecting rankings.
By Yao Liu, Yu He