Answer Only as Precisely as Justified: Calibrated Claim-Level Specificity Control for Agentic Systems
Agentic systems often fail not by being entirely wrong, but by being too precise: a response may be generally useful while particular claims exceed what the evidence supports. We study this failure mode as overcommitment control and introduce compositional selective specificity (CSS), a post-generation layer that decomposes an answer into claims, proposes coarser backoffs, and emits each claim at the most specific calibrated level that appears admissible. The method is designed to express uncertainty as a local semantic backoff rather than as a whole-answer refusal. Across a full LongFact run and HotpotQA pilots, calibrated CSS improves the risk-utility trade-off of fixed drafts. On the f...
| Authors | Tianyi Huang, Samuel Xu, Jason Tansong Dang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 May 2026 |
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