Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation

arXiv:2607.18240v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent. We address this issue through Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE), a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict instead of requiring a true/false decision for every claim. The evaluated system is a tool-using verification agent that gathers evidence through web search, scholarly search, and executable checks, and then returns a structured verdict with confidence and source-level metadata. On ECE-Bench, ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims. Although ECE does not outperform the strongest retrieval baseline on aggregate calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error, Brier score, or AURC, it delivers a clear selective-prediction trade-off: the system maintains very high accuracy on answered claims while deferring 6 of 95 cases. These deferred cases are concentrated in lower-reliability evidence settings (5/6 at source level L4), supporting the view that abstention functions as a safety-oriented mechanism for handling epistemically weak evidence. Code is available at https://github.com/ cheshireyang/ECE.git
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BatchDAG: LLM-Planned Execution Graphs for Scalable Ad-Hoc Analysis Over Enterprise Data

arXiv:2607.18241v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at analyzing individual documents but break down on exhaustive, cross-entity analytical questions over enterprise-scale datasets due to context overflow, loss of per-entity attribution, and linear latency from sequential tool calls. We present BatchDAG, a system in which an LLM generates a typed directed acyclic graph (DAG) of operations — SQL queries, semantic searches, in-memory transforms, parallel fan-outs, and single-shot analyses — which a deterministic engine evaluates with topological-wave parallelism and structured JSON data flow. A key optimization, entity-aware batching, groups rows by logical entity before fan-out, reducing LLM calls by up to 47x. BatchDAG is not primarily an accuracy improvement over hand-optimized pipelines; rather, it is a general-purpose orchestration layer that replaces multiple hand-engineered workflows with a single system that generates the appropriate execution strategy from natural language. In controlled experiments on 12 transcript-heavy queries, BatchDAG (3.74/5) achieves quality comparable to an expert-designed pipeline (3.25/5) and significantly outperforms a ReAct agent (3.09/5, p<0.01), with superior provenance (77% transcript evidence rate vs. 46-60% for baselines). A controlled ablation shows structured JSON intermediates reduce hallucinations by 27% versus prose summaries (paired t-test, p=0.107, n=12). The planner achieves 98.8% valid-DAG rate across 300 planning calls. In production at Brevian.ai, BatchDAG processes queries over 50,000+ meetings in under 60 seconds, with measured per-query costs of $0.02-$0.24 at published GPT-5.1 pricing.
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AI Tool Discovery at Scale: All You Need is DNS

arXiv:2607.18242v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The coming era of autonomous AI agents demands a discovery mechanism capable of navigating millions of tools, yet existing solutions buckle under O(N) complexity and centralized governance. Instead of building another fragile overlay, we propose ToolDNS, a radical framework that retrofits semantic tool discovery onto the Internet’s most resilient substrate: the Domain Name System (DNS). By embedding functional intent and organizational trust into a hierarchical namespace, ToolDNS transforms an expensive semantic search into a series of lightweight, O(log N) name resolutions. We introduce three protocol-compliant enhancements to enable decentralized governance and semantic pruning: partially unfolded names, EDNS0 intent payloads, and logical subdomains. To rigorously evaluate this approach across the fragmented tooling landscape, we construct and release a large-scale heterogeneous benchmark comprising 33,688 real-world tools spanning MCP, A2A, RESTful, and Skill protocols. On this dataset, ToolDNS slashes the per-query search space by 95.26% while matching state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy. Furthermore, its UDP-native design reduces discovery latency by orders of magnitude compared to HTTP-based registries. Our work demonstrates that scalable AI interoperability requires not more middleware, but a smarter utilization of the infrastructure already beneath our feet.
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From Agent Failure Paths to Quantified Residual Risk: A Compositional Framework for Resilient Agentic AI

arXiv:2607.18243v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agentic AI is crossing trust boundaries faster than current risk models can represent. Existing approaches provide one of two partial views. They either describe failure mechanisms without producing a transferable residual-risk estimate, or they produce a risk estimate while treating the internal failure path as a black box. We couple those two views by proposing CPSAINT, a seven-layer integrity decomposition over Physical state, Sensors, Data, Compute, Actuators, Environment, and Time, paired with FRIESA-K, a residual-risk functional that maps each failure path to a quantified risk instance. FRIESA-K grounds the resistance term K in a controlled absorbing Markov model so that control effectiveness is derived from state dynamics rather than assigned as an informal score. The result is a concise mechanism-to magnitude pipeline for resilient agentic and embodied AI. We report governance observability through a separate additive penalty instead of inserting governance as a new variable in the resistance functional. We formalize structural composability linking valid failure paths to well-defined risk instances and show the framework on two contrasting scenarios a hard real-time warehouse robot and a governance-instrumented financial-services agent. Across both cases, the same layer grammar, variable semantics, and dynamic-resistance construction remain intact. Thus, we obtain a compact kernel that supports cross-domain reasoning, explicit assumptions, and quantitatively grounded formalism of composable trust.
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