Polished but Unresolved: Identifying Late-Stage Pressure States in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents
Long-horizon tool-use agents need not only to search and plan, but also to decide when to finalize. We study late-stage pressure states, in which an agent is biased toward submitting a final answer that appears complete and polished while key constraints remain unresolved. We first train a linear probe to show that this pressure state is identifiable from the agent's hidden states. Then, we use activation interventions along this pressure direction and find that shifting the hidden states changes both the pressure score and whether the agent continues tool use or submits early. Through controlled context manipulations, we further see that the pressure is mitigated by constraint clarity an...
| Authors | Haoyang Chen, Yi Liu, Jianzhi Shao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 1 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 September 2026 |
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