I discuss some quantitative representations of Promise Theory for processes involving autonomous agents. Agent models are common in software systems, machine learning, and biology, for example, but may also apply to physics and other forms of engineering. I describe how Bayesian probability and information theoretic optimization, including Active Inference, may be incorporated with promise semantics -- as well as how Promise Theory supplements solutions, helping to avoid probability's pitfalls, which include non-local coordination, calibrating, and normalizing probabilistic computations. The role of boundary conditions in constraining allowed states and selecting decision thresholds is a form of promise, and agent alignment provides a scalable definition of intent. Autonomous agents may congeal into swarms with superagent characteristics by trying to minimize their information, despite uncertainty that works to maximize it. The use of Promise Theory involves some research challenges as well as stylistic preferences.
LLM-agent workflows chain model calls and tool invocations, and spend most of their wall-clock time waiting on upstream operations before downstream ones can start. Speculative execution can reclaim that idle time by launching a downstream operation with a predicted upstream input, but here each speculation costs real money (per-token billing) and its success probability is hard to estimate and drifts over time. This paper presents a method organized around five design decisions: (D1) start a downstream operation before its upstream completes; (D2) price each speculation in real dollars at separate input and output rates; (D3) expose a single operator dial for latency versus cost; (D4) decide via an expected-value rule with a failure-weighted cost term and a preference-adjusted threshold; and (D5) estimate the success probability with a Bayesian Beta-Binomial posterior whose prior is keyed to a dependency-type taxonomy. Variants of these ideas appear in recent work; the combination, with every decision logged in dollars, is what is new. The rule fires only on edges passing an admissibility precondition (side-effect-free, idempotent, or stageable behind a commit barrier), since a wrong speculation is rolled back by re-execution, which refunds tokens but cannot un-send an irreversible side effect. We specify the runtime mechanics, a closed-form result that the rule self-limits as the upstream branching factor grows, a five-stage calibration pipeline (offline replay, shadow, canary, online calibration, drift-triggered kill-switch), and a workload-fit rubric over eight production archetypes. Contrast tables against the four closest published systems (DSP, Speculative Actions v2, Sherlock, B-PASTE) show differentiators on every dimension, and a synthetic validation suite confirms the predicted decision boundary, probability threshold, posterior recovery, and streaming-cancellation behavior.
Dae Yon Hwang, Raunaq Suri, Valentin Villecroze +4cs.LG cs.AI
LLM agents operate in two distinct regimes: open-weight agents amenable to reinforcement learning (RL) and black-box agents whose behaviour must be controlled purely at test time. Although black-box agents are often backed by state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs, API-only access precludes parameter-level optimization, rendering most RL methods inapplicable. To address this limitation, we turn to a known equivalence between RL and Bayesian inference. We propose Agentic Monte Carlo (AMC) to directly sample from the optimal policy of a black-box agent rather than training it through RL. The optimal policy is a posterior over trajectories whose prior we define as the fixed black-box LLM agent. We employ Sequential Monte Carlo to sample from this posterior by learning a value function to steer the agent while leaving the underlying black-box model unchanged. We validate AMC on three diverse environments from the AgentGym benchmark, demonstrating significant improvements over prompting baselines and even outperforming Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as we scale the test-time compute of our method. AMC demonstrates the feasibility of performing principled RL-style optimization of black-box LLM agents. Code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/Agentic-Monte-Carlo