aiqbench analysis
This research reframes error recovery in LLM agents as a causal decision problem, introducing the Causal Intervention Router (CIR) to selectively intervene only when beneficial rather than applying blanket fixes. By distinguishing between rescue operations and harmful disruptions on long-horizon tasks, the study offers a rigorous method to improve agent reliability without compromising successful trajectories. The findings demonstrate that strategic, data-driven intervention yields measurable gains in task success rates while preserving correct observations.
When Harnesses Lose the Signal: Causal Evaluation of Recovery in LLM Agents
arXiv:2610.00372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents rely on external harnesses to pass information between the model and its environment and to recover from execution errors. Yet recovery is usually judged only by average task success. This hides an important tension. The same operation can rescue a failing trajectory or disrupt one that would otherwise succeed. We frame recovery as a causal decision problem. Starting from the same execution state, we compare what happens with and without recovery, separate rescue from harm, and study how the value of recovery changes over time. We then introduce the Causal Intervention Router (CIR), a lightweight policy that uses information available before recovery to decide when intervention is worthwhile. On long-horizon ALFWorld tasks with Qwen3-14B, CIR raises success from 70.33% to 73.33%, a gain of 3.00 percentage points. It leaves all evaluated trajectories with correct observations untouched. Additional controls show that the benefit of recovery cannot be explained solely by the new observation returned by the environment. These results provide a practical way to evaluate recovery and apply it selectively.
Abstract:Large language model agents rely on external harnesses to pass information between the model and its environment and to recover from execution errors. Yet recovery is usually judged only by average task success. This hides an important tension. The same operation can rescue a failing trajectory or disrupt one that would otherwise succeed. We frame recovery as a causal decision problem. Starting from the same execution state, we compare what happens with and without recovery, separate rescue from harm, and study how the value of recovery changes over time. We then introduce the Causal Intervention Router (CIR), a lightweight policy that uses information available before recovery to decide when intervention is worthwhile. On long-horizon ALFWorld tasks with Qwen3-14B, CIR raises success from 70.33% to 73.33%, a gain of 3.00 percentage points. It leaves all evaluated trajectories with correct observations untouched. Additional controls show that the benefit of recovery cannot be explained solely by the new observation returned by the environment. These results provide a practical way to evaluate recovery and apply it selectively.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.00372 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.00372v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.00372 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 267 words
