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HFEPX · Eval paper review

Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarification Timing Matter for Long-Horizon Agents?

Anmol Gulati, Hariom Gupta, Elias Lumer, Sahil Sen +1 more

Published

May 8, 2026

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

25/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

May 8, 2026

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
25/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Abstract

Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors. When instructions are incomplete, the agent must decide not only whether to ask for clarification but when, and no prior work measures how clarification value changes over the course of execution. We introduce a forced-injection framework that provides ground-truth clarifications at controlled points in the agent's trajectory across four information dimensions (goal, input, constraint, context), three agent benchmarks, and four frontier models (three per benchmark; one on a single benchmark only; 84 task variants; 6,000+ runs). Counter to the common intuition that "earlier is always better," we find that the value of clarification depends sharply on what information is missing: goal clarification loses nearly all value after 10% of execution (pass@3 drops from 0.78 to baseline), while input clarification retains value through roughly 50%. Deferring any clarification type past mid-trajectory degrades performance below never asking at all. Cross-model Kendall tau correlations (0.78-0.87 among models sharing identical task coverage; 0.34-0.67 across the full 4-model panel) confirm these timing profiles are substantially task-intrinsic. A complementary study of 300 unscripted sessions reveals that no current frontier model asks within the empirically optimal window, with strategies ranging from over-asking (52% of sessions) to never asking at all. These empirical demand curves provide the quantitative foundation that existing theoretical frameworks require but have lacked, and establish concrete design targets for timing-aware clarification policies. Code and data will be publicly released.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors."

Reported Metrics

partial

Kendall tau, Pass@3

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Counter to the common intuition that "earlier is always better," we find that the value of clarification depends sharply on what information is missing: goal clarification loses nearly all value after 10% of execution (pass@3 drops from 0.78 to baseline), while input clarification retains value through roughly 50%."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

kendall taupass@3
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Unit of annotation
Trajectory (inferred)
Expertise required
Coding
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
Long Horizon
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors.
  • When instructions are incomplete, the agent must decide not only whether to ask for clarification but when, and no prior work measures how clarification value changes over the course of execution.
  • We introduce a forced-injection framework that provides ground-truth clarifications at controlled points in the agent's trajectory across four information dimensions (goal, input, constraint, context), three agent benchmarks, and four frontier models (three per benchmark; one on a single benchmark only; 84 task variants; 6,000+ runs).

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Long-horizon tasks) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Contribution summary

  • Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors.
  • When instructions are incomplete, the agent must decide not only whether to ask for clarification but when, and no prior work measures how clarification value changes over the course of execution.
  • We introduce a forced-injection framework that provides ground-truth clarifications at controlled points in the agent's trajectory across four information dimensions (goal, input, constraint, context), three agent benchmarks, and four…

Why it matters for eval

  • Long-horizon AI agents execute complex workflows spanning hundreds of sequential actions, yet a single wrong assumption early on can cascade into irreversible errors.
  • We introduce a forced-injection framework that provides ground-truth clarifications at controlled points in the agent's trajectory across four information dimensions (goal, input, constraint, context), three agent benchmarks, and four…

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: kendall tau, pass@3