← 首页|学术|From Sequence to Structure: Relational Uncertainty Propagation for LLM Agents
cs.CL, cs.AI · 2608.16002 · 2026/08/17

From Sequence to Structure: Relational Uncertainty Propagation for LLM Agents

Cao, Zhengzhao Ma. Boxi, Lu, Yaojie, Lin, Hongyu, Han, Xianpei, Sun, Le
TL;DR:RUPA 把 agent 执行历史建模为有向轨迹图(推理状态、工具交互、环境反馈为节点,时序/语义依赖为边),在图上传导不确定性,捕获跨步骤累积的执行风险,替代只盯局部 token 概率的 UQ。

🎯 问题

现有 LLM agent 的 UQ 靠局部信号(token 概率、预测熵、单步置信),漏掉长程依赖——错误在数步之前的推理或交互中埋下,最终答案却看似自信。

🔬 方法

执行历史 → 有向轨迹图(推理状态/工具交互/环境反馈为节点,时序与语义依赖为边);不确定性沿图传播,捕捉风险如何跨交互步骤累积转移;传播信号 + 轨迹级行为特征 + goal-alignment 信息合成置信估计。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
1 Introduction
2 Related Works
3 Empirical Analysis of Agent Uncertainty
4 Methods
5 Experiments
6 Conclusion

📊 结果

在长程 agent 任务上比局部 UQ 方法更早识别根因在多步之前的失败;在 agent 交互基准上置信校准与失败检出优于基线。

💡 与研究方向关联

agent 长程执行的可靠性核心:错误多步前的埋点与最终输出解耦——与 duplex 关注「实时交互层之外需要一个对整条轨迹负责的推理/监控层」互补。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for deploying large language model (LLM) agents in complex interactive environments. Existing UQ methods largely rely on local signals, such as token probabilities, predictive entropy, or per-step confidence, and therefore overlook the long-range dependencies through which errors accumulate across an execution trajectory. As a result, they may fail to identify agent failures whose causes originate several reasoning or interaction steps before the final answer. We propose RUPA (Relational Uncertainty Propagation for Agents), a trajectory-level UQ framework for LLM agents. RUPA represents an execution history as a directed trajectory graph in which reasoning states, tool interactions, and environment feedback are nodes connected by temporal and semantic dependency edges. It then propagates uncertainty over this graph to capture how execution risk accumulates and transfers across interaction steps. The propagated signal is combined with trajectory-level behavioral features and goal-alignment information to produce a confidence estimate for the full agent trajectory. We evaluate RUPA on representative agent benchmarks, including $\tau$-2, Terminal-Bench-2, and GAIA, using 6 open-source LLMs spanning multiple model families. Experimental results show that RUPA consistently outperforms existing UQ methods by providing more accurate uncertainty estimates, enabling earlier failure detection, and improving uncertainty-guided agent execution across diverse agent tasks. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling relational dependency is crucial to reliable UQ for long-horizon LLM agents, providing a practical foundation for trustworthy agent execution.
Deep Read · 2026-08-19高松灯 / Agent 日报 · Agent 架构与推理
不确定性Agent可靠性轨迹图UQ