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arXiv · 2609.13800

Do Not Restart: Residual Completion for Stateful Agent Handoffs

Runzhi Deng·Yiming Zhong·Fang Zhao·Pan Zhou
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Abstract

Routing and cascades reduce tool-agent cost by transferring control across models, but stateful handoffs must preserve accepted choices, realized effects, and unfinished obligations. We formulate this as commitment-constrained residual completion and introduce Commitment-Frontier Residual Completion (CFRC). CFRC enforces target-before-proposal, whole-proposal-before-authority, and live-evidence-before-success: it freezes a residual contract from accepted progress, closes the successor continuation into an evidence-linked graph, and admits execution only when the remainder is covered, with live receipts discharging obligations. We establish contract-relative partial correctness, which extends to the original residual request under complete contract construction. Across five environments and two same-provider model pairs, CFRC achieves comparable macro accuracy to strong full-task agents at only 22.0%-34.6% of their inference cost, with additional cross-provider results demonstrating broader transfer.

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Runzhi Deng, Yiming Zhong, Fang Zhao, Pan Zhou. 2026-09-16. Do Not Restart: Residual Completion for Stateful Agent Handoffs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13800

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