让AI把思考过程告诉用户,比单纯多想更有用。
Thinking Is Not Telling: Information Disclosure in User-Service LLM Agents
- 提出信息披露机制,衡量AI向用户传递关键信息的能力
- 实验证明多思考不等于更好沟通,反而可能延迟重要信息
- 轻量提示可提升信息外显,适合做服务型AI的优化方向
用户参与的LLM代理在服务场景中日益普遍,任务成功依赖于代理、用户与状态化环境之间的协作。在此类交互中,代理常掌握用户不可见的任务策略、工具结果和环境状态。因此,代理与用户的沟通成为任务完成的核心。本文研究用户服务代理的通信层面失败模式:用户不可见的推理并不必然带来及时的信息披露。我们引入信息披露作为可度量的沟通机制,涵盖状态修正、可用选项、约束条件、后果说明及主动获取的环境信息。通过分析广泛使用的“think”工具(允许代理内部推理后再响应或行动),在五种模型和三个服务场景下发现:强制思考的效用不稳定;增加内部思考量并不可靠地提升用户端沟通内容丰富度。基于证据引导探测和逐轮反事实干预,结果显示注入关键决策信息能显著提升首次编辑修正率,优于冗长输出或直接控制思考内容。这表明缺失信息披露会因果影响代理后续环境修改行为。进一步发现,轻量级披露感知提示可缓解强制思考带来的性能下降。结论是,核心挑战并非让代理思考更多,而是确保其私有推理和环境知识被适时转化为用户可见的信息披露。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
User-engaged LLM agents increasingly operate in service scenarios where task success depends on coordination between the agent, the user, and a stateful environment. In such interactions, the agent often has access to task policies, tool results, and environment states that the user does not observe. This makes agent-user communication a central component of task completion. In this work, we study a communication-level failure mode of user-service agents: user-invisible reasoning does not necessarily translate into timely user-facing information disclosure. We introduce information disclosure as a measurable communication mechanism, covering state corrections, available options, constraints, consequences, and proactively retrieved environment information. We use this perspective to analyze the widely used user-invisible ``think'' tool, which allows agents to reason internally before responding or acting. Across five models and three user-service scenarios, we first show that enforced thinking has unstable utility. We then analyze response scaling under different think efforts and find that more internal thinking does not reliably translate into richer user-facing communication. Using evidence-grounded probing and turn-level counterfactual intervention, we show that injecting golden decision-relevant information produces the clearest improvement in First Edit Correction Rate, outperforming verbosity and direct think-content controls. This indicates that missing disclosure can causally affect the agent's immediate downstream environment-edit behavior. We further find that a lightweight disclosure-aware prompt mitigates degradation from enforced thinking. These results suggest that the key challenge is not simply making agents think more, but ensuring that private reasoning and environment knowledge are externalized as timely, user-facing information disclosure.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。