Thinking Outside the Box: Can Language Models Rely on External Guidance Selectively?
Agent harnesses often improve language models with human-designed workflows, but as models grow more capable, unreliable guidance can increasingly constrain their execution. We call the ability to benefit from useful guidance while overriding unreliable guidance thinking outside the box. We introduce Box$^2$-Bench, which holds the model and task fixed while varying workflow reliability to isolate how models regulate their reliance on guidance. On Box$^2$-Bench, frontier models often benefit from reliable guidance but remain vulnerable when it is misleading or becomes unreliable. To test whether this capability can be learned, we train two open-weight models using bad workflows, reserving ...
| Authors | Minghan Wang, Boyuan Wang, Jinhang Zuo et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
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