# How Strongly Should Task State Influence an LLM Agent?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25686/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 65 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

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- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
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- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
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- [Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17753/) (2024)
- [Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19413/) (2025)
- [LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10813/) (2024)
- [τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07982/) (2025)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
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- [AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18901/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Long-horizon assigned work requires an LLM agent to track the state of a task: which steps are done, blocked, cancelled, or open to repetition. Agent systems either keep this state as text in the prompt and rely on the model to read that text, or move the state into a module that enforces it, and each system is evaluated as a whole, so no one knows how much reliability comes from the state being shown, told, or enforced. We fix the task rules, the model, and paired episodes and vary how strongly task state reaches the agent: a raw transcript, an exact checklist, per-turn directives from a state machine compiled from the brief and advanced only by execution receipts, or an enforcement gate on that machine that refuses state-violating actions; every episode is scored by exact payload matching against dynamic ground truth. Across three models, two reasoning regimes, and two domains, four findings hold without per-turn reasoning: displaying accurate state is unreliable, an unverified ledger the agent writes itself beats an accurate checklist it is shown, directives help in proportion to the model's obedience, and enforcement needs no obedience but is bounded by the correctness of its state and by the matcher that maps requests to steps; per-turn reasoning at a 235B agent compresses these separations without repairing the text rungs. The same gate, compiled from τ2-bench's airline policy, raises a 235B agent's pass1 from 0.39 to 0.54 and changes nothing for a 35B agent that rarely violates the policy; on PM-Bench, where acting turns on recognizing a cue rather than on state, showing the record is the best rung--matching or beating both gates and reversing the ledger-over-checklist finding--and enforcing the matcher's judgement drops a 35B agent below its raw transcript. Enforcement pays when failures are state-decidable and frequent, and hurts when the gate's judgement is wrong.