Smart Alone, Blind Together: Why Accuracy Fails to CertifyTheory of Mind in Multi-Agent Teams
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The paper argues that accuracy is an inadequate metric for certifying a coordinator’s theory‑of‑mind in multi‑agent systems, because the required accuracy depends on deployment‑specific costs and errors are often dependent. Experiments on task assignment, Level‑Based Foraging, Hanabi, and human judgments show that accuracy can both approve harmful language‑model deployments and reject beneficial ones. The authors propose a Blind‑Spot Gate that evaluates error costs, pairwise interactions, and dependence without deployment, achieving better safety outcomes than accuracy alone.
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
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.
The study investigates how humans and AI collaborate on a puzzle task, focusing on referential uncertainty—when a description could refer to multiple objects. It finds that eliciting a belief distribution over candidate pieces yields better calibration and discrimination than raw action probabilities, and that precise descriptions or well‑targeted hedges significantly reduce the acceptance of wrong placements. However, the AI rarely externalizes uncertainty, and poorly targeted hedges can be counterproductive.
arXiv:2607. 17044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step enterprise agent tasks fail in a characteristic way: single-pass inference has no checkpoint between deciding an answer and committing to it.
Large language model (LLM) agents now fix software, operate computers and serve customers, but their harnesses, the programs that run them, call a large LLM at every step, which makes long tasks slow...