ResearchResearch paperEfficiency & Inference · Agents & Tool Use1 source · Oct 18, 2026

Auditing Tool Traces in Agentic LLMs: Source Localization and Counterfactual Dependence Testing

Agentic LLMs increasingly support scientific prediction by grounding decisions in external evidence.

Key points

  • Stage 1, Per-Tool TF-IDF Decomposition (PT2D), localizes label-predictive patterns to individual tool results while avoiding signal dilution in the concatenated tool trace.
  • Stage 2, Token-Class Redaction, counterfactually tests whether the frozen LLM depends on the localized shortcut.
  • We apply this audit to TCR-pMHC binding, where tool augmentation substantially outperforms a no-evidence baseline.
  • These findings show how hidden label shortcuts can masquerade as scientific reasoning or discovery, motivating source-level audits before benchmark gains are trusted.

Sources (1)

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

Before this

  1. Oct 17, 2026EdgeKernelBench: Unified LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for Edge Backends
  2. Oct 16, 2026[Research] 2,788 tokens/s on a single RTX 5090 with a diffusion LLM — Introducing ORL (fully open source)
  3. Oct 16, 2026Characterising and Analysing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Techniques
  4. Oct 16, 2026Scaling Indic Pretraining: 2.8 Trillion Tokens and an Open Data Generation Pipeline
  5. Oct 16, 2026OR-License: Evaluating LLM Agents as Real-World Operations Research Practitioners
  6. Oct 16, 2026Language Models Learn to Improve Language Models

Related