{"podcast":{"title":"Daily Paper Cast","slug":"daily-paper-cast-7079649","podcast_index_feed_id":7079649,"rss_url":"https://feeds.transistor.fm/daily-paper-cast-ai","website_url":"https://dailypapercast.transistor.fm/","image_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/IxaBeiMluxrMS9W9wB8hFMfmvH27KvwaSMzuhucupn0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:1400/h:1400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Zjg1/YzRhODczMDU4MmE4/OGMwN2FiNDlmYzI2/MDliMi5qcGVn.jpg","author":"Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang","episode_count":2000,"summary":"We update every weekday to discuss highest-voted papers from Huggingface Daily Paper (https://huggingface.co/papers). Both the podcast scripts and audio are generated by AI. Feedback and suggestions are welcome! Email us: dailypapercast.ai@gmail.com Creator: Jingwen Liang, 3D ML, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jingwen-liang/ Gengyu Wang, LLM ML, http://wanggengyu.com Listen on: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/21nrhmdaA8qoBiH8q03NXL Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-paper-cast/id1777620236 Cover Image by Kawen Kuang https://kawen.art","last_synced_at":"2026-09-09T20:18:08.781137+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/daily-paper-cast-7079649"},"episode":{"title":"Agentic Abstention: Do Agents Know When to Stop Instead of Act?","slug":"agentic-abstention-do-agents-know-when-to-stop-instead-of-act","published_at":"2026-07-01T04:33:49+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/daily-paper-cast-7079649/agentic-abstention-do-agents-know-when-to-stop-instead-of-act","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/daily-paper-cast-7079649","url":"https://share.transistor.fm/s/89ee6fbd","audio_url":"https://media.transistor.fm/89ee6fbd/984c7091.mp3","summary":"🤗 Upvotes: 124 | cs.AI Authors: Han Luo, Bingbing Wen, Lucy Lu Wang Title: Agentic Abstention: Do Agents Know When to Stop Instead of Act? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28733v1 Abstract: LLM agents are expected to act over multiple turns, using search, browsing interfaces, and terminal tools to complete user goals. Yet not every goal is well specified or achievable in the available environment. In such cases, a reliable agent should recognize that further interaction is unlikely to help and abstain from additional tool calls. We define Agentic Abstention, the problem of deciding when an agent should stop acting under uncertainty. Unlike standard LLM abstention, which is usually evaluated as a single-turn answer-or-abstain decision, agentic abstention is a sequential decision problem: an agent can answer, abstain, or gather more information at each turn, and the need to abstain may only become clear after interacting with the environment. We study this problem across web shopping, terminal environments, and question answering, evaluating 13 LLM-as-agent systems and 2 agent scaffolds on more than 28,000 tasks. Our results show that the main challenge is not only whether agents can abstain, but also when they abstain. Some agents never abstain when they should, while others do so only after many unnecessary interactions. This gap is especially large on tasks where the instruction appears feasible until the environment reveals otherwise (e.g., no valid result matches the instruction). We further find that model scale, reasoning, and agent scaffolding affect abstention in different ways, where larger or more capable models sometimes perform worse at timely abstention. Finally, we introduce CONVOLVE, a context engineering method for improving agentic abstention that disti…","meta_description":"🤗 Upvotes: 124 | cs.AI Authors: Han Luo, Bingbing Wen, Lucy Lu Wang Title: Agentic Abstention: Do Agents Know When to Stop Instead of Act? Arxiv: http://a…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1453,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/daily-paper-cast-7079649/episodes/agentic-abstention-do-agents-know-when-to-stop-instead-of-act/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/daily-paper-cast-7079649/agentic-abstention-do-agents-know-when-to-stop-instead-of-act.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}