Why2Speak: Faithful Reasoning for Abstaining Action Policies
Many agentic systems must repeatedly choose between acting and abstaining, making faithful reasoning important for oversight: an explanation is useful only if it reflects the computation that produced the action. We study this problem through intervention timing in multi-party conversation, where an assistant must decide whether to speak or remain silent. This setting exposes class imbalance, asymmetric action costs, and the possibility that exposing reasoning changes the policy being audited. Using Qwen3-8B, decoded with or without chain-of-thought reasoning, we compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. We find a capability-...
| Authors | Shreya Mendi, Brinnae Bent |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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