mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Not Self-Decidable: LLMs Cannot Draw the Boundary of What an Agent Verifier Can Check

arXiv 2610.04699 ↗First posted 3 Oct 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.CRcited by 0

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

A verifier for an agent faces rules of two kinds: the ones a fixed check can settle and the ones that require a judge. A team that derives its own checks fixes that split up front. Where the requirements come from outside, as in finance, healthcare and law, the agent enforces rules it did not write, so the split falls to runtime, recurring for every predicate of every rule on every action at a rate no reviewer can audit. Every escalation scheme assumes a model can make that decision itself, that it is self-decidable. Across six corpora, including the EU AI Act, FINRA guidance and a deployed credit agent, we collect roughly 22,000 labels from four models built by three labs. They agree almost perfectly where the answer is obvious and collapse on regulatory text; their errors run in opposite directions, so no model can be trusted as the conservative choice; and on the deployed agent's own rule-set they err together, over-claiming that a fixed check will do, the direction that never gets escalated. We introduce CoVer (corroborate-then-verify), which treats unanimity as a nomination, admitting a predicate only when the check synthesized for it survives intervention, reading fields the agent cannot write and holding under deterministic rewording. That gate rejects most of what corroboration wrongly admits, at a cost in coverage we report rather than tune away. The obvious alternative, agreement with a reference judge, certifies nothing: it climbs from 30% to 77% across calibration bands while the genuinely decidable share does not move, because a judge drawn from the population under indictment ratifies the blind spot it shares. Self-decidability is not a capability to elicit from a model but a boundary the verifier must construct.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2026.

Builds on

12 of 28 references.

References · 12

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  4. 2023Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Modelscited by 1,228
  5. 2025AgentSpec: Customizable Runtime Enforcement for Safe and Reliable LLM Agentscited by 223
  6. 2024A Survey on Large Language Models for Critical Societal Domains: Finance, Healthcare, and Lawcited by 74
  7. 2025TRiSM for Agentic AI: A Review of Trust, Risk, and Security Management in LLM-based Agentic Multi-Agent Systemscited by 59
  8. 2025Writing-Zero: Bridge the Gap Between Non-verifiable Tasks and Verifiable Rewardscited by 50
  9. 2026Dynamic Model Routing and Cascading for Efficient LLM Inference: A Surveycited by 19
  10. 2026MIRROR: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Metacognitive Calibration in Large Language Modelscited by 6
  11. 2026FormalJudge: A Neuro-Symbolic Paradigm for Agentic Oversightcited by 4
  12. 2026Evaluating Ill-Defined Tasks in Large Language Modelscited by 3

Built on by

Not cited yet.