Backend
When Tools Lie: Reliability of Mathematical Agents Under Corrupted Tool Feedback
arXiv cs.SE0 views
arXiv:2610.08097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mathematical problem solving often requires deterministic computational steps that agents delegate to tools and implicitly trust. Yet tools can fail silently, returning plausible but incorrect results. How well can agents detect and correct corrupted tool call outputs? We study this through a controlled corruption framework where a hidden interceptor replaces tool call results with plausible incorrect information on targeted problems. We evaluate agents across 31 problems under four verification designs including no verification (baseline), mandatory same-context reflection, optional fresh-context verification, and optional structural verification. Without verification, corruption causes dramatic accuracy loss, from 100% down to 72.4%. Mandatory reflection fully recovers this performance to 100%. Optional verification improves accuracy only when models actively invoke it. Our results show that checking frequency is strongly associated with robustness differences, while unequal invocation prevents a controlled comparison of verifier quality. A supporting recovery experiment shows that full problem restart succeeds in 100% of cases after explicit detection. These findings demonstrate that verifier availability and verification policy are separate components of mathematical-agent reliability. Mandatory policies enforce verification while optional policies depend on the model's own choice to invoke it.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08097PreviousFC-SWE: Failure-Conditioned RL for Long-Horizon Software Engineering AgentsNextHow Much Evidence Should a Coding Agent's Self-Correction Carry? Adaptive Dirichlet Evidence for Self-Distillation
Related posts
A tampered Claude Code extension, five broken coding-agent browsers, and agents nobody owns
0dev.to

What Is Danmaku? How to Download Bilibili Bullet Comments and Find Any Video's Highlight
0dev.to

Whoever takes your old GitHub name gets your MCP namespace
0dev.to

What Is Danmaku? How to Download Bilibili Bullet Comments and Find Any Video's Highlight Of Bilibili
0dev.to
Low-Cost Property Ticket Summarization — Token Reduction Strategies in Node.js
0dev.to

Passing once is not the same as being reliable
0dev.to