mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

When Aggregate Alignment Misleads: Auditing Policy Repair Without Per-State Expert Actions

arXiv 2607.03386 ↗First posted 3 Jul 2026cs.AI cs.LGcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic AI systems are increasingly used to edit, refine, and repair decision policies, but evaluating these edits is difficult when per-state expert action labels are unavailable. We study this problem in a hotel-pricing simulator where an agentic policy editor receives only region-level diagnostic feedback: summaries of how its price distribution differs from a benchmark policy across time, inventory, and market regions. The editor cannot observe benchmark actions, benchmark source code, reward numbers, or held-out outcomes, and may only propose constrained edits to a target-action table. On 5,000 held-out episodes, a multi-restart LLM editor reaches RevPAR 108.47 (95% CI 107.61 - 109.34), close to the benchmark policy's 108.75 (107.81 - 109.68), with paired gap (LLM minus benchmark) -0.276 and 95% CI [-0.692, 0.146]. A cheap diagnostic projection already recovers much of the revenue (107.90), so the LLM editor's distinctive gain is not raw revenue lift alone: it also reduces episode composition distance from 1.153 to 0.609. This is the strongest non-benchmark repair result. This profile is not explained by restart search alone: non-semantic proposers with up to 2,500 evaluations fall 8.77 - 14.57 RevPAR points short. Nor is it explained by plausible prompt format: a shuffled-diagnostic control breaks region-error correspondence and falls to RevPAR 94.30. The match is genuine but partial. A tree editor achieves stronger pooled alignment, 0.214 versus 0.266, and stronger reference-state D1, 0.328 versus 1.197, yet revenue falls to 98.91. These results show that agentic policy repair should be evaluated by whether diagnostic feedback becomes reliable closed-loop outcome, not by a single behavioral distance.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 7 of its 11 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2026.

Builds on

7 of 11 references.

References · 7

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  3. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  4. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agentscited by 400
  5. 2018A Survey of Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Challenges, Methods and Progresscited by 294
  6. 2025Evaluation and Benchmarking of LLM Agents: A Surveycited by 145
  7. 2019Empirical Study of Off-Policy Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learningcited by 121

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

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  1. 2026Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay
  2. 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflows
  3. 2026AI Alignment via Incentives and Correction
  4. 2026Benchmarking Agents in Insurance Underwriting Environments
  5. 2026No Judgment Without a Reason: Counterfactual Receipts for Versioned AI Evaluators
  6. 2025Beyond Accuracy: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Evaluating Enterprise Agentic AI Systems
  7. 2026STOCKTAKE: Measuring the Gap Between Perception and Action in LLM Agents with a Fair Oracle
  8. 2026AuditBench: Evaluating Alignment Auditing Techniques on Models with Hidden Behaviors