Action Verification through Conjecture and Refutation for Language Model Agents

Minhyeon Oh, Chiyeong Heo, Geonwoo Noh, Hoyoung Kim, Jangwon Son +1

Language model agents increasingly act on users' behalf by manipulating external environments through tools, often from high-level instructions that leave critical task- and environment-specific context unstated. To prevent resulting misaligned actions, recent work verifies proposed actions before execution, largely by establishing whether the conditions supporting them hold. We argue that this confirmation-oriented view leaves a fundamental blind spot: a wrong action often passes every check that asks whether it is right. This motivates a different question for verification: rather than asking what evidence supports an action, can the agent find evidence that refutes it? We pursue this direction with BlackSwan, a refutation-oriented, expect-suspect-test procedure that predicts the intended effect of each state-mutating action, formulates specific and empirically testable hypotheses for how it could be wrong, and tests them using existing observations or additional non-mutating actions, executing the action only if none survives testing. On challenging AppWorld tasks, BlackSwan improves success rate over the strongest baseline by 14.9 and 25.2%p with and without the backbone…