arXiv:2608.20670cs.AIcs.CL2026-08

研究智能体在对话中何时发言或沉默的推理可靠性,发现解释暴露会改变决策行为。

Why2Speak: Faithful Reasoning for Abstaining Action Policies

  • 用链式思考和直接策略对比,测试推理对决策的影响
  • 强决策性能与可解释性存在权衡,推理导致召回率下降12%
  • 现有评估方法易受偏差影响,可能高估推理真实性

许多智能体需反复在行动与不行动之间抉择,忠实推理对监督至关重要:解释必须真实反映决策过程。本文以多方对话中的干预时机为场景,研究助手何时发言或保持沉默。该任务具有类别不平衡、动作成本不对称,且暴露推理可能改变被审计策略的问题。基于Qwen3-8B模型,采用有无思维链解码的方式,比较直接决策策略、推理策略、监督微调与强化学习。结果表明存在能力-可审计性权衡:最强的直接策略性能更高但无推理痕迹;推理策略虽提供决策路径,但召回率显著下降(降低12%)。监督微调或压制推理,或保留但未提升性能;强化学习亦未能改善推理策略。我们识别出失败机制:群体相对目标在一致错误提示下无法提供学习信号。控制激活探针与行为消融实验显示,标准忠实性方法可能夸大推理与决策的一致性。概率度量在高置信决策下饱和,探针受类别不平衡与文本泄漏影响,推理消融则混淆了推理内容与推理模式变化。这些结果说明,暴露推理本身会改变智能体的行动策略,而非仅使其可观测。本文提供可用于评估可行动/不行动智能体推理监督的控制方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Many agentic systems must repeatedly choose between acting and abstaining, making faithful reasoning important for oversight: an explanation is useful only if it reflects the computation that produced the action. We study this problem through intervention timing in multi-party conversation, where an assistant must decide whether to speak or remain silent. This setting exposes class imbalance, asymmetric action costs, and the possibility that exposing reasoning changes the policy being audited. Using Qwen3-8B, decoded with or without chain-of-thought reasoning, we compare direct decision policies, reasoning policies, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. We find a capability-auditability tradeoff: the strongest direct policy achieves higher quality but exposes no reasoning to inspect, while the reasoning policy provides a trace at the cost of lower performance, particularly recall of true intervention opportunities. Supervised fine-tuning either suppresses reasoning or preserves it without improving decision quality, while reinforcement learning also fails to improve the reasoning policy. We identify one mechanism underlying this failure: group relative objectives provide no learning signal on confidently wrong prompts when sampled rollouts all select the same action. Controlled activation probes and behavioral ablations show that standard faithfulness methods can overstate evidence that exposed reasoning reflects the underlying decision process. Probability-based metrics saturate under confident decisions, probes are vulnerable to class imbalance and textual leakage, and reasoning ablations can confound reasoning content with changes in inference mode. Together, these results show that exposing reasoning can change an agent's action policy rather than simply make it observable. We provide controls for evaluating reasoning-based oversight of agents that can act or abstain.

智能体决策可解释性推理验证对话系统

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