How Much LLM Does a Self-Revising Agent Actually Need?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07236v2
• Date: Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:07:15 GMT
• Title: How Much LLM Does a Self-Revising Agent Actually Need?
• Abstract summary: We introduce a declared reflective runtime protocol that externalizes agent state, confidence signals, guarded actions, and hypothetical transitions into inspectable runtime structure.<n>We evaluate it on noisy Collaborative Battleship using four progressively structured agents over 54 games.
• Score: 0.14323566945483496
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Recent LLM-based agents often place world modeling, planning, and reflection inside a single language model loop. This can produce capable behavior, but it makes a basic scientific question difficult to answer: which part of the agent's competence actually comes from the LLM, and which part comes from explicit structure around it? We study this question not by claiming a general answer, but by making it empirically tractable. We introduce a declared reflective runtime protocol that externalizes agent state, confidence signals, guarded actions, and hypothetical transitions into inspectable runtime structure. We instantiate this protocol in a declarative runtime and evaluate it on noisy Collaborative Battleship [4] using four progressively structured agents over 54 games (18 boards $\times$ 3 seeds). The resulting decomposition isolates four components: posterior belief tracking, explicit world-model planning, symbolic in-episode reflection, and sparse LLM-based revision. Across this decomposition, explicit world-model planning improves substantially over a greedy posterior-following baseline (+24.1pp win rate, +0.017 F1). Symbolic reflection operates as a real runtime mechanism -- with prediction tracking, confidence gating, and guarded revision actions -- even though its current revision presets are not yet net-positive in aggregate. Adding conditional LLM revision at about 4.3\% of turns yields only a small and non-monotonic change: average F1 rises slightly (+0.005) while win rate drops (31$\rightarrow$29 out of 54). These results suggest a methodological contribution rather than a leaderboard claim: externalizing reflection turns otherwise latent agent behavior into inspectable runtime structure, allowing the marginal role of LLM intervention to be studied directly.

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