When Responsibility Guidance Hurts: A Pilot Study of PreExecution Projection in LLM Agents

TMLR Paper9212 Authors

Abstract: Multi-agent LLM orchestration is increasingly framed as a routing problem, an aggregation problem, or a post-hoc failure problem. We study an intermediate object that none of these frames opens up: the responsibility structure an agent projects between receiving a natural-language delegation and executing against an artifact. We formalize responsibility projection as multi-label weight prediction over a closed dimension set, instantiate it on Jv1.1 — a 12-dimension taxonomy for paper-research delegation (seven category dimensions, five cross-cutting) — and use the closure to make projections from different model families directly comparable. The primary empirical contribution (P1) is that pre-execution responsibility projection is measurable and family-attributable: on a 50-example pilot under the v1.3 Anthropic-excluded cross panel (gpt-5 / gemini-2.5-pro / grok-4) with within-model variance estimated from five claude-sonnet-4-6 repetitions at T = 0.5, crossfamily projection mismatch is approximately 6× within-family stochastic variance (median R(d) = 5.87, 95% bootstrap CI [4.47, 7.96], paired bootstrap CI on dC − dW excludes zero, Wilcoxon p < 10−15), and the main-run extension at n = 310 gives median R(d) = 5.40 with CI [4.86, 5.89]. The secondary contribution (P2) is a negative actionability result: under a 12-judge Anthropic-excluded panel and a three-condition execution split, projectiondriven execution shows a directional disadvantage relative to direct execution on the headline weighted-R1 settlement loss (paired diff direct_naive − projection_driven = −0.139, 95% bootstrap CI [−0.169, −0.109]), with the cost concentrating on R1.4 (novelty mapping) and R1.7 (citation audit) — the two dimensions whose s = 5 anchor demands deep specialty engagement; we report this as a boundary condition, not a refutation of the projection layer. The methodological contribution (P3) is a closed Stage 1 human-anchor pilot on R1.7 that surfaces an anchor specifiability ceiling: form-embedded sharpened anchors are insufficient for reliable rater application without a separately-read protocol document, and the humananchor scalability constraint is anchor specifiability and domain-expertise gating, not rater throughput. The scope of this paper is one delegation category (R1, paper-research) at pilot scale (n = 50) with the P1 measurability extension validated at n = 310; the four-condition Experiment 2 with task-aware-routing and CLAMBER-style baselines, longitudinal reputation evaluation on real LLM agents, and a main-run-scale r⋆ extension are reserved for follow-up work.

Submission Type: Long submission (more than 12 pages of main content)

Previous TMLR Submission Url: https://openreview.net/forum?id=kHfqxRVKem&noteId=kHfqxRVKem

Changes Since Last Submission:

The previous TMLR submission was rejected without further review before the scientific review stage. This resubmission addresses the administrative and formatting issues in that submission.

First, the manuscript has been fully converted from the previous non-TMLR two-column format to the official TMLR review format. The current PDF is compiled in the TMLR double-blind review style, with anonymous authorship and the standard TMLR review header.

Second, the submission has been anonymized for double-blind review. Author names, affiliations, email addresses, corresponding-author footnotes, acknowledgments, and PDF author metadata have been removed from the review version. Potentially identifying dataset wording was also revised; for example, the modified-real subset is now described as coming from "one anonymized domain-specific manuscript controlled for identifying information."

Third, the abstract was revised into a single paragraph to comply with the TMLR formatting instructions, while preserving the main claims: the closed responsibility taxonomy $J_{v1.1}$ with $|J|=12$, the pilot-scale evaluation at $n=50$, the main-run validation at $n=310$, the cross-family versus within-family comparison using $R(d)$ and $d_C-d_W$, and the pilot-bound limitation of the $r^\star$-weighted settlement-loss analysis.

Fourth, the citation and manuscript layout were adjusted to match the TMLR style. The scientific framing, core experiments, and main conclusions remain the same: pre-execution responsibility projection is measurable and family-attributable, naive projection-driven execution shows a negative actionability result under the current pilot design, and human-anchor scalability is limited by anchor specifiability and domain-expertise gating.

Assigned Action Editor: ~Di_Wang1

Submission Number: 9212