Look Before You Leap: Pre-Action Verification for LLM Agents
An LLM agent acts on the world by emitting actions: shell commands to run, edits to apply. A wrong action does not always fail loudly; it can fail silently, producing a plausible but incorrect effect that raises no error. We argue that a cheap deterministic check, run before an action takes effect, is an effective and underused form of agent oversight, and we study it across two action modalities in one framework. The idea is to fix an action's correct effect by construction, before any executor runs, so that silent failure is measured directly and the verifier may abstain rather than guess. For shell commands, a static verifier over 9930 commands and 482 tools catches 95.8% of invalid co...
| Authors | Asaad Althoubi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 9 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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