Judged Useless, Queried Anyway: Tool-Using Agents Rarely Turn Their Own Evidence Judgments into Stopping Decisions
An agent whose tool keeps returning nothing useful should stop relying on it. In a retrieval environment with controlled source failures, we separate how agents judge results from what they do. We compare stopping at the same step after longer and shorter runs of results the agent judged useless; this contrast is zero for clock- or deadline-driven stopping. Where we record their judgments, the seven agents we test call a failing source's results useless 97-100% of the time, yet most of them rarely stop on that judgment. Prompt cues change when they stop but not what they stop on. Permission to answer from memory and a reasoning mode can bring early stops regardless of evidence, a stated b...
| Authors | Chubin Zhang, Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 5 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 October 2026 |
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