让AI代理智能决定何时求助,减少无谓调用同时保证决策质量。
Strategic Decision Support for AI Agents

- 基于反事实漏助误差构建优化框架,自动判断何时该请求支持。
- 实验显示在多场景下可大幅降低支持调用次数,且错误率可控。
- 适合需要高效人机协作或工具调用的AI系统开发者使用。
传统决策支持关注人类如何利用机器学习模型做决策。在现代智能体系统中,角色反转:AI代理代表用户行动,而人类和工具成为辅助。这种反转带来可靠性挑战,因代理错误可能后果严重,其行为必须与人类目标和约束对齐。本文重新审视决策支持的两个基本原理——支持成本与价值权衡、不确定性量化——在以AI代理为核心的新场景下。提出一种战略决策支持框架,通过优化问题最小化支持使用量,同时控制反事实漏助误差(即代理在本应求助的情况下独自行动的概率)。在群体层面,最优策略是基于支持价值的阈值规则。在此基础上,设计在线算法,自适应设定阈值并采用随机探索控制漏助误差,无需分布假设。进一步提出即时校准方法,动态减少不必要的支持调用。在信息收集、人机协作和工具使用等多样场景中验证该框架,均能统一建模。实验表明,该方法可靠控制目标误差,显著降低实际支持使用量。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Traditionally, decision support studies how humans use machine learning models to make better decisions. In modern agentic systems, this division of roles is increasingly reversed: AI agents act on behalf of users, while humans and tools becomes support mechanisms around them. This role reversal brings reliability concerns to the forefront, since agentic errors can be consequential and agent behavior must remain aligned with human goals and constraints. Departing from the classical view of decision support, we revisit its two basic principles, the cost--value tradeoff of seeking support and the role of uncertainty quantification, in a setting where AI agents are the central actors. We propose a framework for strategic decision support for AI agents through an optimization problem that minimizes support usage subject to controlling a counterfactual missed-support error: the probability that the agent acts alone on instances where support would have materially improved its output. At the population level, we show that the optimal policy is a threshold rule on the value of support. Building on this structure, we develop an online algorithm that adaptively thresholds such a score and uses randomized exploration to control missed-support error without distributional assumptions. We further introduce a calibration-on-the-fly method that reduces unnecessary support calls online. We instantiate this framework across diverse scenarios, including information gathering, human--AI collaboration, and tool use, showing how each can be modeled through the same strategic decision-support lens. Experiments across these settings show that our method reliably controls the target error while substantially reducing support usage in practice.
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