Commitment Hierarchies under Intent Revision: A Belief-Revision Account of Salvage in Tool-Use Agents
When a user changes their mind partway through a task, an agent that has already split the task into sub-goals and paid for tool calls must decide, per cached sub-result, whether to keep, patch, or discard it (salvage), restarting wastes valid work and continuing unchanged answers the old question. Our main finding is that salvage quality is a matter of role design rather than model capability: a language model asked the keep/patch/discard question one node at a time is unreliable, but asked to classify the revision once, with a deterministic layer propagating the decision, it reaches the cost-optimal oracle on all three models tested, from two vendors. Modeling the plan as a commitment h...
| Authors | Spandan Ghose Chowdhury |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 28 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 September 2026 |
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