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Dan C. Hsu

Publications and source records attributed to Dan C. Hsu.

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Where Knowledge and Authority Sit Changes What an Agent Benchmark Can Resolve

Most agent benchmarks put facts, tools and permissions behind one interface. Real organizations spread them across people. Incognita asks what happens when the task and success criterion stay fixed but access does not. We transform eighteen customer-service tasks into three settings: direct access, one known intermediary, and six role-isolated participants whose capabilities must be discovered. Across 864 trials with four models, social access reduced success for every model; the pre-specified intervals excluded zero for two. The latest tested model, gpt-5.6-sol, achieved the highest social-access success at 0.65, a 0.11 decrease from centralized indirect access with an interval that included zero. Exploratory comparisons separated five of six model pairs under social access, while neither centralized setting separated any at this sample size. In post-hoc task-blocked tests, three pairwise interaction $p$-values remained significant after multiplicity adjustment. A reference-relative reader associates the wider gaps with failures to obtain needed information. Because the data cannot distinguish ineffective requests by the evaluated agent from inaccurate replies by simulated participants, the reader's labels describe where trajectories stopped, not why models differed.

cs.AI

Scoped Verification for Reliable Long-Horizon Agentic Context Evolution under Distribution Shift

Deployed LLM agents rely on agentic context, the model-external textual control content assembled by an operational harness. In this work, the mutable component of that context is a persistent system-level instruction that is updated from operational experience while the model, tools, and harness remain fixed. Over long evolution horizons, flat-text maintenance makes verification increasingly difficult as accumulated instructions grow and interact. We propose Graph-Regularized Agentic Context Evolution (GRACE), which maintains the persistent instruction component as a typed semantic graph and validates proposed updates within the local typed neighborhoods of modified nodes. Accepted graph updates are reconstructed as incremental edits to the textual instruction checkpoint used at deployment. We evaluate GRACE within a fixed telecom agent harness derived from $τ^2$-bench under a controlled distribution-shift protocol. Across five independent replications, GRACE improves strict reliability, measured by pass^3, from the Gemini 2.5 Flash zero-shot value of 0.091 to 0.673$\pm$0.136 at the final checkpoint. This exceeds a Gemini 3.1 Pro zero-shot reference of 0.242 on the same held-out set, while the flat-text HCE baseline finishes at 0.191$\pm$0.051. These results identify two requirements for reliable long-horizon context evolution, a structural substrate that makes verification local and a consolidation mechanism that keeps accumulated instruction content usable.

cs.AI