Confidence Laundering in Agent Systems: Why Uncertainty Needs a Latent Carrier
Modern agent systems can turn uncertainty into overconfidence. Fragile upstream decisions are often exposed to downstream components as clean intermediate artifacts, while the uncertainty behind those decisions is lost at the interface. As a result, local ambiguity can become system-level error amplification. We argue that this reveals an interface bottleneck in agent uncertainty propagation: uncertainty does not propagate simply because a trajectory contains uncertain steps; it propagates only when it survives the handoff between components. We define uncertain decision handoff as the transfer of an intermediate decision made under uncertainty, and identify confidence laundering as a fai...
| Authors | Kaiwen Shi, Zheyuan Zhang, Han Bao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 June 2026 |
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