The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State
Agent frameworks increasingly delegate work by forking sub-agents; a common default makes the child inherit the parent's full working context. We measure how the effect of inherited state changes with capability, where $C_m$ denotes clean fork-fresh accuracy. We compare 3 inheritance policies: Reset (fork fresh: base evidence only), Selective (curated handoff: + the useful prior conclusion), and Full (implicit fork: + the useful conclusion and $d$ copies of a superseded conclusion) over a same-family ladder (Qwen3 0.6/1.7/4/8B) on a frozen, closed-set, action-scored benchmark. Every task is solvable from the base evidence, so performance loss can be attributed to reliance on stale state. ...
| Authors | Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
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