LLM agents act in external environments where each action changes the state that later decisions condition on, and where a single wrong step can waste interaction budget or trigger irreversible side effects long before the final failure is observed. Reliable deployment therefore requires \emph{step-level confidence estimation}: a calibrated probability that each proposed action is productive, available \emph{before} the action is executed.
arXiv:2508. 14390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often express verbal confidence that is poorly aligned with actual correctness, limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications.
By Ke Fang, Tianyi Zhao, Qianwen Wang, Lu Cheng
arXiv:2607. 01480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), along with recent selfdistillation variants such as SDPO, evaluates each rollout against a verifier and updates the policy from that episode-level signal.
By Ye Liu, Srijan Bansal, Bo Pang, Yang Li, Zeyu Leo Liu, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.
By Aojie Yuan, Yi Nian, Haiyue Zhang, Zijian Su, Yue Zhao
Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance.
arXiv:2607. 06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable.
By Kai Ruan, Zihe Huang, Ziqi Zhou, Qianshan Wei, Xuan Wang, Hao Sun