Judged Useless, Queried Anyway: Tool-Using Agents Rarely Turn Their Own Evidence Judgments into Stopping Decisions

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.06191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An agent whose tool keeps returning nothing useful should stop relying on it. In a retrieval environment with controlled source failures, we separate how agents judge results from what they do. We compare stopping at the same step after longer and shorter runs of results the agent judged useless; this contrast is zero for clock- or deadline-driven stopping. Where we record their judgments, the seven agents we test call a failing source's results us