This paper introduces a systems-level conceptual framing and a three-level taxonomy (intra-model, system-level, socio-technical) for uncertainty propagation in compound LLM applications, along with engineering insights and open challenges.
Structured Uncertainty guided Clarification for LLM Agents
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abstract
LLM agents with tool-calling capabilities often fail when user instructions are ambiguous or incomplete, leading to incorrect invocations and task failures. Existing approaches operate in unstructured language spaces, generating clarifying questions through prompting strategies that lack principled criteria for determining which questions to ask and when to stop. We introduce a principled formulation of structured uncertainty that operates directly over tool parameters and their domains, cleanly separating specification uncertainty (what the user wants) from model uncertainty (what the LLM predicts). Our formulation uses Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI) to quantify the disambiguation value of each potential question, balanced against aspect-based cost modeling that prevents redundant questioning. We demonstrate the versatility of this formulation through two applications. First, SAGE-Agent uses structured uncertainty for inference-time question selection, achieving 7-39% higher coverage on ambiguous tasks while reducing clarification questions by 1.5-2.7x compared to strong prompting and uncertainty-based baselines. Second, we show that structured uncertainty provides effective training signals: uncertainty-guided reward modeling boosts When2Call accuracy from 36.5% to 65.2% (3B model) and 36.7% to 62.9% (7B model) through uncertainty-weighted GRPO training, demonstrating more sample-efficient reinforcement learning for tool-calling agents. To enable evaluation, we present ClarifyBench, the first multi-turn dynamic tool-calling disambiguation benchmark. Our results establish structured uncertainty as a principled framework that improves both inference-time interaction efficiency and training-time sample efficiency in tool-augmented agents.
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2026 8roles
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background 1representative citing papers
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HiL-Bench shows frontier AI agents fail to ask for help on incomplete tasks, recovering only a fraction of full-information performance, but RL training on Ask-F1 reward improves judgment and transfers across domains.
Bayesian controller for coding agent tool orchestration outperforms fixed rules when verification is costly and yields better uncertainty scores than token probabilities or tool success.
A prompt-based uncertainty decomposition separates action confidence from request uncertainty to enable clarification seeking in LLM agents, yielding F1 gains of 73% and 36% over baselines on two new underspecified benchmarks across five models.
Coding agents require a three-level proactivity taxonomy (Reactive, Scheduled, Situation Aware) evaluated by insight policy quality using Insight Decision Quality, Context Grounding Score, and Learning Lift.
The paper introduces an Information Gain Reward to train clarification behavior in LLM agents, reporting a 3.7% success rate gain over no-clarification baselines in τ-Bench evaluations across five models with minimal added steps.
Agentic AI orchestration should apply Bayesian principles for belief maintenance, updating from interactions, and utility-based action selection.
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