RECEIPT: Measuring and Repairing the Return Assumption of LLM Agents in Web Service Operations

Boyang Yang, Ziyao Yang, Yu Zhang, Duo Chai, Xiaoming Chen +1

LLM agents operate Web infrastructure from the command line and rely on a return assumption, namely that each tool call returns within a bounded time and with its requested action finished. Many commands, however, ask a question before they act, and the agent's harness either closes the program's input or keeps it open as a terminal at which nobody types. With closed input, the program can return status 0 without the requested action. With open input, it waits until a time limit, and the agent pays in time and tokens. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to measure and repair the return assumption. We collect 91,469 production tool calls and 89,047 public agent trajectories, test how 8 widely used harnesses launch commands, and build Litmus, a catalog of 158 checked command-line invocations, and Tripwire, a benchmark of 25 task pairs that differ only in whether a question guards the requested action. We then propose RECEIPT, which keeps the input open, reads what each process waits for from system calls, and returns this state to an unmodified agent through a model-checked protocol. On Litmus, closed input causes 11.5% of tested invocations to return status 0…