When Agents Commit Too Soon: Diagnosing Premature Commitment in LLM Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22936v1
• Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:13:13 GMT
• Title: When Agents Commit Too Soon: Diagnosing Premature Commitment in LLM Agents
• Abstract summary: Long-answer LLM agents can fail quietly: they settle on one reading of the evidence early, then spend the rest of the run defending it.<n>We define representational commitment as cross-run hidden-state convergence at a fixed reasoning step.<n>A runtime monitor detects inconsistent trajectories from hidden states at AUROC up to 0.97 (0.85--0.88 under a stricter split)
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents can fail quietly: they settle on one reading of the evidence early, then spend the rest of the run defending it. We call this premature commitment. Final-answer scoring misses the failure mode because it sees only the answer, not whether the process has already collapsed to a stable path. We define representational commitment as cross-run hidden-state convergence at a fixed reasoning step, and use it as an early diagnostic of trajectory consistency. On Llama-3.1-70B running ReAct on HotpotQA, step-4 hidden-state similarity predicts downstream behavioral consistency (r = -0.35, partial r = -0.45), with a localized temporal and layer-wise signature. The signal replicates across Qwen-2.5-72B and Phi-3-14B, and on StrategyQA (r = -0.83). It does not track correctness: committed-wrong and committed-correct questions are not separable in activation similarity. That boundary is central to the claim. Commitment tells us whether an agent has settled, not whether it is right. A runtime monitor detects inconsistent trajectories from hidden states at AUROC up to 0.97 (0.85--0.88 under a stricter split), and a prompting intervention cuts behavioral variance by 28% against a token-matched control while leaving accuracy statistically unchanged. We also test whether the signal can route self-consistency compute; on a harder benchmark it helps only modestly and is matched by a simpler output-based baseline. The result is a diagnostic for a hidden process failure, with clear limits rather than a general accuracy lever.

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