arXiv AI
Outcome-Aware Agents: When Does Causal Structure Help a Forward Model Foresee the Consequences of Actions?
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arXiv AI
Jun 9
Causal Agent Replay: Counterfactual Attribution for LLM-Agent Failures
arXiv:2606. 08275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When an LLM agent fails -- issues a refund it should not have, calls the wrong tool, leaks data -- existing tooling answers what happened (observability) or whether it passed (evaluation), but not which step caused the failure.
arXiv AI
Oct 16
Human Interventions as Labels: Localizing, Steering, and (Sometimes) Editing the Computations Behind LLM Agent Failures
The paper treats human interventions during LLM agent failures as labels that pinpoint the internal computation that went wrong, rather than merely training data. In a controlled environment, the authors analyze one failure type—over‑asking a clarifying question when the request is already clear—using rule‑based overseer labels validated by blind human judgment. They find that the decision to ask versus act can be causally localized across several models, that over‑asking exhibits distinct mechanistic signatures, and that steering or weight consolidation can mitigate the issue, though outcomes vary by model family.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
CausalNav: Reliability-Certified Causal World Models for Control under Physical-Parameter Shift
arXiv:2608. 07809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A world model is only useful for physical AI if it changes what the agent does, and only safe if it declines to do so when it is wrong.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
From Causal Plausibility to Causal Reliability: Evaluating LLMs as Calibrated Direct Causal-Edge Classifiers
The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.
arXiv AI
Oct 16
StepSafe: Learning Timely Intervention with Context-Aware Safety Reasoning
StepSafe introduces a training framework called ASPO that focuses on step‑level timely intervention in agentic systems. It aligns decisions with their respective prefixes, rewards actions that fit the current stage, and uses adaptive feedback self‑distillation to credit reasoning. The resulting StepSafe guardrail achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on five agent‑safety benchmarks, improving the safety‑utility Pareto curve with a Youden’s J of 53.0 for a 4B model.
arXiv AI
Oct 23
Steering Black-Box Large Language Model Agents with Pitfall Anticipation World Model
The paper introduces the Pitfall Anticipation World Model (PAWM), a selective guidance system for black-box large language model agents. PAWM predicts imminent failures in a bounded multi-step future and intervenes only when a potential pitfall is detected, reducing costly and often uninformative step-by-step predictions. Trained first with supervised fine-tuning on synthetic pitfall-labeled data and then co-trained with a black-box LLM, PAWM boosts Claude Sonnet 4.5’s performance by 24.3% on ScienceWorld and 7.7% on WebArena-Lite, outperforming several baselines.