TLDR Tech / Practical
A detector is not a fix
Researchers evaluating coding agents discovered that while tool-entropy collapse reliably detects when an agent is wandering and failing to submit, injecting the "success" representation into the network's early layers does not steer the agent back to completion. Instead, trying to use the detection fingerprint as a causal repair lever either leaves the model inert or destabilizes it into malformed tool calls. The findings demonstrate that a detector is not a lever, meaning deployable monitors can be used to stop failed runs but cannot be naively inverted into one-shot repairs.
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