Outcome Monitors: Recovery Affordances for Silent Tool Failures
When a tool call times out, the agent sees the failure and can route around it. A cached error page or negative price can instead arrive in the expected format and be consumed as fact. We introduce Outcome Monitors, which detect violations of outcome contracts mined from task-disjoint traces or derived from public schemas. On a violation, the monitor preserves the result and issues a nonbinding receipt naming the violated property and public recovery tools. In frozen, prespecified evaluations with injected failures, Outcome Monitors raise ToolMaze completion from 10.9% to 28.1% across four models in two provider families and replicate in a third. In tau-bench retail, completion improves b...
| Authors | Sugam Panthi, Rabab Abdelfattah |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 August 2026 |
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