提出用隐式不确定性载体,防止智能体系统中错误自信的传播。
Confidence Laundering in Agent Systems: Why Uncertainty Needs a Latent Carrier

- 引入隐式不确定性作为决策传递中的承载者,保留上游脆弱性。
- 实验证明,未携带不确定性的中间结果会引发下游过度信任与错误放大。
- 适合关注智能体系统可靠性与可恢复性的研究者参考。
现代智能体系统会将不确定性转化为过度自信。上游脆弱的决策常以清晰的中间产物形式传递给下游组件,而其背后的不确定性在接口处丢失。结果导致局部模糊演变为系统级错误放大。我们指出,这暴露了智能体不确定性传播中的接口瓶颈:不确定性并非因轨迹包含不确定步骤就自然传播;它只有在组件间传递时存活才能传播。我们将不确定决策传递定义为在不确定下做出的中间决策的转移,并识别出‘信心清洗’这一故障模式——即上游脆弱状态被重新包装为看似合规的产物,导致下游智能体过度信任。为解决此瓶颈,我们提出隐式不确定性作为承载不确定性的载体,附加于决策传递接口。不同于用隐藏状态替代文本,隐式不确定性旨在保留预承诺的脆弱性,使下游组件可利用。该方法将智能体不确定性传播从逐步估计转向可恢复的接口设计。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Modern agent systems can turn uncertainty into overconfidence. Fragile upstream decisions are often exposed to downstream components as clean intermediate artifacts, while the uncertainty behind those decisions is lost at the interface. As a result, local ambiguity can become system-level error amplification. We argue that this reveals an interface bottleneck in agent uncertainty propagation: uncertainty does not propagate simply because a trajectory contains uncertain steps; it propagates only when it survives the handoff between components. We define uncertain decision handoff as the transfer of an intermediate decision made under uncertainty, and identify confidence laundering as a failure mode in which fragile upstream states are repackaged as procedurally valid artifacts that downstream agents over-trust. To address this bottleneck, we propose latent uncertainty as an uncertainty-bearing carrier attached to decision handoffs. Rather than replacing text with hidden states, latent uncertainty aims to preserve pre-commitment fragility in a form that downstream components can use. This position shifts agent uncertainty propagation from step-wise uncertainty estimation toward uncertainty-preserving interface design for more recoverable agent systems.
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