BlackSwan: Refutation-Based Action Verification for Language Model Agents

arXiv:2611.02950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language model agents increasingly act on users' behalf by manipulating external environments through tools, often from high-level instructions that leave critical task- and environment-specific context unstated. To prevent resulting misaligned actions, recent work verifies proposed actions before execution, largely by establishing whether the conditions supporting them hold. We argue that this confirmation-oriented view leaves a fundamental blind spot: a wrong action often passes every check that asks whether it is right. This motivates a different question for verification: rather than asking what evidence supports an action, can the agent find evidence that refutes it? We pursue this direction with BlackSwan, a refutation-oriented, expect-suspect-test procedure that predicts the intended effect of each state-mutating action, formulates specific and empirically testable hypotheses for how it could be wrong, and tests them using existing observations or additional non-mutating actions, executing the action only if none survives testing. On challenging AppWorld tasks, BlackSwan improves success rate over the strongest baseline by 14.9 and 25.2%p with and without the backbone model's thinking mode, respectively. Even without thinking or in-context demonstrations, it outperforms stronger baselines equipped with them. The gains also transfer beyond AppWorld, with BlackSwan improving WebShop performance by 12.7%p. More broadly, our results suggest that language model agents have an underused capacity to recognize and self-correct misaligned actions, which can be systematically elicited through active conjecture and refutation before execution.