Agents that act on a compressed representation of their history face a structural risk: if the representation aliases histories with different optimal actions, no rule measurable with respect to the representation can avoid an irreducible per-round loss, and the agent may be unable to detect this from its own transcript. This paper develops a four-layer theory of self-certification of representation adequacy.
arXiv:2609.06036v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Proposal-based controllers---learned policies, language-model planners, and other black-box \emph{generators}---are increasingly deployed behind runtim...
By Guangxi Wan, Yongbo Xie, Yuqi Liu, Qingwei Dong, Qingxin Li, Hongfei Bai, Peng Zeng
The paper investigates how verifier components used in post‑training and test‑time loops can collapse when they are refreshed based on aggregate success scores. It shows that as a policy improves on one conjunctive target, the verifier’s on‑policy AUC can shift to favor a worse component, leading to a preference for a full‑outcome predictor over the intended component oracle. The authors provide theoretical thresholds, empirical demonstrations on text control and ECG data, and propose a repair that audits the component on its own failures to prevent damage.
By Daniel Cie\'slak, Jacek {\L}ubi\'nski
arXiv:2607. 15459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A trained deep reinforcement learning policy is a black box, and we ask whether it can be made explainable by rewriting it as an executable logic program that reproduces its behaviour and that a person can read, a logic engine can run, and an optimizer can edit.
By Eduardo C. Garrido-Merch\'an
Certified Anchor-Based Adaptation (CABA) is a post‑update gate for continual adaptation that reserves historical observations, compares old and candidate policies on frozen representations, and selects the largest interpolation coefficient whose worst‑anchor forward KL divergence stays within a declared budget. The method does not require action labels or complete trajectories and is supported by a theory‑led certification framework that provides uniform behavioral‑divergence bounds under representation‑coverage and Lipschitz assumptions. In a UCI Human Activity Recognition study, CABA reduced mean forgetting from 1.01 % to 0.00 % at a budget ε = 0.05, while slightly lowering final average accuracy.
By Ahanaf Hasan Ariq, Abrar Shahid
The paper introduces the concept of task‑conditioned active observability, defining the minimal interaction cost needed for an autonomous agent to identify task‑relevant states while guaranteeing safe abstention. It formalizes this complexity, proving that task‑predictive equivalence yields a unique minimal sufficient quotient that preserves complexity and eliminates unnecessary distinctions. The authors present theoretical characterizations for deterministic and noisy regimes, and demonstrate a certified observer that reduces sensor usage and model steps while maintaining zero false acceptances in extensive high‑dimensional trials.
By Linzhe Zhang, Changming Xu