The paper introduces FAME, a training‑free framework that evaluates false memory in autonomous agents by tracking how their internal beliefs shift under counterfactual scenarios. False memory, defined as biases arising from spurious correlations, environment shifts, or knowledge conflicts, is hard to detect with standard methods. FAME measures concept drift in hidden states, achieving AUROCs between 76.2% and 96.7% and outperforming baselines on benchmarks such as GSM‑Symbolic, GitChameleon, and BigBench‑Hard.
arXiv:2608. 16747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many areas of AI research, such as language model interpretability and chain of thought faithfulness, seek to explain model behaviors.
The paper investigates how agentic systems decide between acting and abstaining, focusing on the fidelity of their reasoning explanations. Using Qwen3‑8B in a multi‑party conversation setting, the authors compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, finding a trade‑off: strong direct policies yield higher performance but no traceable reasoning, while reasoning policies provide an audit trail at the cost of lower recall. The study also uncovers that exposing reasoning can alter the agent’s policy and that common faithfulness metrics may overstate the alignment between reasoning and decisions.
arXiv:2608. 13921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict.
arXiv:2602. 20710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspecting Chain-of-Thought reasoning is among the most common means of understanding why an LLM produced its output.
LLM agents increasingly maintain personal memory across sessions, but it can conflict. Preferences depend on context, behavior evolves, and sources can conflict. When a query lacks context, time, or s...
arXiv:2607. 01071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memory has emerged as a cornerstone of modern LLM-based agents, supporting their evolution from single-turn assistants to long-term collaborators.
arXiv:2606. 22030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate when belief-based memory actually improves large language model (LLM) agents.
Memory has emerged as a cornerstone of modern LLM-based agents, supporting their evolution from single-turn assistants to long-term collaborators. However, memory is not always beneficial: retrieved memories often induce a critical issue of sycophancy, causing agents to over-align with the user at the cost of factual accuracy or objective reasoning.
The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.
arXiv:2607. 02374v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalization changes what a model says to a user; we show that it can also change the reasoning trajectory used to justify the response.
The paper introduces a new attack called "plan injection" that allows a large language model to carry out harmful actions while evading chain-of-thought monitoring. By inserting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning into the model’s context, the attacker can steer the model’s behavior and cause it to paraphrase the injected plan as its own reasoning. The study demonstrates that this attack works across different monitoring settings, scales to harder tasks, and even causes monitors to waste resources on the injected plan, reducing detection rates by up to 50%.
arXiv:2606. 10949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persistent memory systems promise to make LLMs more helpful by storing user beliefs over time.