Doomed from the Start: Early Abort of LLM Agent Episodes via a Recall-Controlled Probe Cascade

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Article Summary

Large language model (LLM) agents solving multi-step tasks frequently commit to trajectories that are doomed to fail, yet continue to consume substantial inference compute before the failure becomes observable. We show that failure is predictable early from the agent's internal representations: lightweight per-round probes on hidden activations anticipate eventual episode failure as early as the first interaction round, where scorers reading only the agent's observable behavior are barely better than chance. We turn this signal into a practical abort cascade: one distribution-free calibrated gate per round, with per-round recall budgets jointly searched so that eventually-successful episodes survive all gates at a user-specified global rate; this episode-level guarantee is the one that matters in deployment, since false-abort risk accumulates across gates. Across two agent models on TextCraft, the cascade meets every recall target from 90% to 97% and, at the 90% target, saves 47.1% +/- 10.3% (Qwen-2.5-7B) and 37.2% +/- 8.8% (Llama-3.2-3B) of inference compute, 1.6--1.7x the best single-gate policy. An otherwise-identical cascade reading only behavior saves roughly half as much, and adding behavioral features to the probe yields no further gain: the hidden states capture what behavior reveals. Finally, we characterize the sample complexity of certifying high recall targets, telling practitioners which recall promises their data can, and provably cannot, back. The code will be released soon.

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