RECEIPT: Measuring and Repairing the Return Assumption of LLM Agents in Web Service Operations

Abstract:LLM agents operate Web infrastructure from the command line and rely on a return assumption, namely that each tool call returns within a bounded time and with its requested action finished. Many commands, however, ask a question before they act, and the agent's harness either closes the program's input or keeps it open as a terminal at which nobody types. With closed input, the program can return status 0 without the requested action. With open input, it waits until a time limit, and the agent pays in time and tokens. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to measure and repair the return assumption. We collect 91,469 production tool calls and 89,047 public agent trajectories, test how 8 widely used harnesses launch commands, and build Litmus, a catalog of 158 checked command-line invocations, and Tripwire, a benchmark of 25 task pairs that differ only in whether a question guards the requested action. We then propose RECEIPT, which keeps the input open, reads what each process waits for from system calls, and returns this state to an unmodified agent through a model-checked protocol. On Litmus, closed input causes 11.5% of tested invocations to return status 0 without performing the requested action, and 7 of 8 harnesses close input when no terminal is attached. An unanswered question at a plain terminal multiplies a task's token use by 2.9, and the input connection moves an LLM from 7th to 3rd place among 8. Across 5 LLMs, RECEIPT reduces false claims of success by 73.5% and completes all 25 guarded tasks on a second harness. An agent's reliability therefore depends on what its harness lets it observe as well as on its LLM. Agent builders should report what each tool call did, not only how it ended, and benchmark maintainers should fix and report the input connection before they rank LLMs.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2611.01930 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2611.01930v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.01930 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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