Tool-using agents do not merely consume observations: their actions determine what arrives next. In agentic text-to-SQL, a broad query can spend context and database work before useful evidence appears, while post-hoc compression cannot recover omitted rows or expended work. We present BAP-SQL, which treats observation formation as a budget-control stage: it estimates query risk, rewrites SQL when useful, and delegates hard limits to an independent runtime shield. Across general 4B, specialized FINER-SQL 4B, and 7B backbones, BAP-SQL improves tight-budget success. On the primary BIRD-derived setting, it gains 3.4/3.6 percentage points over matched SFT while using 4.5/5.0% fewer tokens. Matched retraining and task-level transfer associate the gain with policy-visible planning and budget-sensitive rescue. The benefit attenuates as model capability and budget increase, reverses at the loosest setting, and does not reduce database work.
Chong Peng, Pinyan Qian, Su Wang et al.· 2 citations
Personalized agents must decide whether retrieved user memory should be used, ignored, updated, or queried before it affects a current task. We use this setting to develop an empirical audit protocol for structured intermediate outputs: first audit dataset shortcuts, then isolate bundled prompt changes, check whether intermediate labels are answer-associated, test decomposed semantic evidence, and audit provider-level execution failures. A 480-example synthetic development set initially suggested large gains from a state-structured prompt bundle, but TF-IDF diagnostics showed lexical separability and no positive standalone Ignore cases. We therefore construct a frozen 160-example controlled counterfactual set with 40 matched four-way families and rule-derived reference policies. On this set, exposing the four state definitions improves accuracy, but an isolated explicit state-output field does not significantly improve policy accuracy for Llama-3.3-70B and gives only a marginal, non-significant gain for GPT-OSS-120B. Supplying benchmark-associated state labels shifts policy predictions, but because those labels deterministically map to policies, this is a label-conditioning diagnostic rather than evidence of a faithful internal mechanism. Family-level and seed-stability analyses further show that example-level accuracy overstates counterfactual consistency: complete four-way family success is rare. An exploratory follow-up that elicits decomposed semantic evidence also fails to improve routing for the cleanly evaluated endpoint; the corresponding GPT-OSS condition was unavailable because of provider-side request validation. We evaluate policy classification only, not downstream responses, tool actions, or memory-store mutation.
Yihang Chen, Pinyan Qian, Su Wang et al.· 0 citations