arXiv AI By William Jeffries

Who Verifies the Tools? How Warped Formatters Mislead Agents and Their Verifiers

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The paper investigates how tool output formatters can mislead agents and their verifiers by omitting critical details such as search limits, result caps, or identifier namespaces, even when the underlying computation is correct. Experiments with a production Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system and other open‑source agents (OpenClaw, Hermes) show that providing complete formatter information dramatically reduces unsupported agent claims and increases verifier rejection of incorrect answers. The authors provide an audit prompt that can be applied to other systems to uncover and fix similar warped formatters.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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