When Should Models Change Their Minds? Contextual Belief Management in Large Language Models
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2512. 20111v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the time horizons of sequential decision-making tasks grow, keeping full interaction histories in model context becomes increasingly costly.
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.
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.
The paper introduces the Belief-State Engine (BSE), an inference module that supplies a large language model (LLM) with a Bayesian posterior over hidden states in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). By keeping the raw action‑observation log hidden from the LLM, the BSE ensures the agent behaves as a sound Markov policy on the belief MDP, thereby inheriting classical POMDP optimality guarantees. Experiments on the Tiger POMDP and a red‑team attack‑graph task show that BSE‑augmented agents outperform six baselines in task return, belief calibration, and decision consistency.
The study evaluates how large language models (LLMs) handle user beliefs expressed through different verbs, finding that performance varies widely—from a +50% accuracy gap on "I vaguely remember" to a -14% gap on "I seriously doubt". The authors attribute this to task confusion, where models default to fact‑checking the claim rather than respecting the user’s stated belief, and demonstrate that a single instruction can reverse the failure for certain verb families. Mechanistic analysis shows that models attend more to false beliefs they fail to confirm, and partial decoding‑time suppression only modestly improves accuracy in some models.
arXiv:2609.00455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are being used as policies for autonomous decision-making and planning in many domains. Despite their strong reasoning cap...