To Call or Not to Call: Diagnosing Intrinsic Over-Calling Bias in LLM Agents
LLM agents exhibit a consistent tendency to over-call, invoking tools even in situations where none is needed. On the When2Call benchmark, six models from three families show high call accuracy but much lower no-call accuracy, leaving overall accuracy in the 55%-70% range. We trace this to an Intrinsic Bias Hypothesis (IBH): the call/no-call decision mapping carries an activation-independent call offset, so the model favors call even at activation parity. Using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), we recover behavior-aligned feature bases for the call/no_call decision, reduce them to a signed activation margin, and estimate the offset directly. Across all six models, the model is decision-neutral ...
| Authors | Wei Shi, Ziheng Peng, Sihang Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 16 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 October 2026 |
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