Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2609.36344

DeepRewind: Predicting and Repairing Premature Commitments in Deep Research Agents

Abstract

Deep-research agents conduct long-horizon investigations through iterative search, evidence evaluation, belief revision, and synthesis. However, they may commit to claims before sufficient evidence is available, causing later reasoning to reinforce an incorrect interpretation. We introduce DeepRewind, an additive control layer for reversible deep research that represents the agent's evolving epistemic state as a typed graph of sources, evidence, claims, hypotheses, assumptions, commitments, plans, and drafts. Before accepting an intermediate conclusion, a prompt-based world model predicts its impact and estimates reversibility based on hypothesis narrowing, information loss, recovery cost, and contradiction-trigger coverage. A binary controller blocks risky commitments, while a consistency monitor performs dependency-aware rollback when later evidence invalidates them. Across DRBench and LiveDRBench, DeepRewind improves insight recall by 3.6 percentage points and reduces premature commitments by 59.1% relative to Open Deep Research.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Amirhossein Abaskohi, Amirhossein Dabiriaghdam, Lele Wang, Peter West, Giuseppe Carenini. 2026-09-28. DeepRewind: Predicting and Repairing Premature Commitments in Deep Research Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36344

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Evidence-Guided Schema Normalization for Temporal Tabular Reasoning

Temporal reasoning over evolving semi-structured tables poses a challenge to current QA systems. We propose an approach that recasts the task as automated knowledge base construction: (1) prompting an LLM to synthesize a 3NF-compliant relational schema from Wikipedia infobox timelines, (2) populating the schema to obtain a queryable database, and (3) generating and executing SQL queries against it, with QA accuracy serving as an extrinsic evaluation of the constructed knowledge base. In a controlled grid of three schema generators crossed with six query models, the schema source accounts for 79.5% of the exact match (EM) variance against 1.6% for the query model: replacing the schema, and the prompt scaffolding derived from it, shifts EM by 14.7 to 20.0 points, whereas replacing the query model under a fixed schema shifts it by 4.4 to 12.1. From this evidence, we distill three candidate schema-design principles: balanced normalization, semantic naming, and consistent temporal anchoring, framed as correlational hypotheses. Our best configuration (Gemini 2.5 Flash schemas + Gemini-2.0-Flash queries) reaches 80.39 EM, 11.5 points above the strongest reported baseline (68.89 EM); an open-weights configuration reaches 79.52.

cs.CL↗

How Order-Sensitive Are LLMs? OrderProbe for Deterministic Structural Reconstruction

Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is difficult to evaluate automatically because scrambled sentences often admit multiple valid reorderings. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including Semantic Accuracy, Logical Validity, Structural Consistency, Robustness, and Information Density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent gap between meaning-oriented generation and exact structural reconstruction, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.

cs.CL↗

SalamahBench: Dialect and Category Level Safety Evaluation of Arabic Language Models

While different stakeholders are trying to leverage Arabic Language Models (ALMs), safety alignment in ALMs remains largely underexplored, hindering their mainstream adoption. Existing safety benchmarks are predominantly English-centric and evaluate Arabic only in its standardized form, obscuring fine-grained safety vulnerabilities in Arabic NLP systems. This paper introduces SalamahBench, a unified benchmark of 8{,}270 human-verified harmful prompts across ML Commons hazard categories, each rendered in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and five regional Arabic varieties, namely Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi, Lebanese, and Moroccan, for a total of 49{,}620 paired instances. To analyze the resulting data, we introduce two complementary metrics, namely Dialect Shift, which measures a model's aggregate change in safety under dialectal reformulation, and Category-Specific Dialect Deviation, which isolates harm categories whose change departs from that aggregate trend. Evaluating models such as Fanar 2, ALLaM 2, and Karnak 1 under multiple safeguard configurations, we find that cross-variety robustness is strongly model dependent, and that aggregate scores can conceal category-level divergence. Our findings highlight the necessity of evaluating Arabic model safety jointly across linguistic varieties and harm domains rather than relying on aggregate scores or MSA alone.

cs.CL↗