PolicyGuide: From Guarding One Action to Guiding the Whole Workflow for Policy-Compliant LLM Agents

Customer-service LLM agents must follow organizational policy when acting on a user's behalf. Compliance failures arise from either forbidden actions, such as granting an ineligible change, or omitted procedural requirements, such as identification or confirmation. Runtime safeguards can intervene on risky actions, but action-local checks do not guide an agent through a multi-step procedure. Workflow-following systems support prescribed process execution, but primarily target workflow completion rather than safeguarding agent behavior. PolicyGuide instead compiles each domain policy into a workflow graph and invokes a proactive verifier at user-turn boundaries. From persisted graph state, the verifier reconciles open requests and returns step-specific remediation along a policy-compliant path. Across the $τ^2$-bench airline, retail, and telecom domains with a GPT-5.4 agent and verifier, PolicyGuide raises mean $\mathrm{Pass}^4$ from $0.42$ to $0.62$, with the largest gain on telecom ($0.19$ to $0.61$), the most workflow-structured domain. The same workflows transfer to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 2.5 Pro agents. Complementary evaluations find the lowest observed attack-success rate under adversarial users and the strongest procedural compliance in an author-designed workflow-level validation.

Where Knowledge and Authority Sit Changes What an Agent Benchmark Can Resolve

Most agent benchmarks put facts, tools and permissions behind one interface. Real organizations spread them across people. Incognita asks what happens when the task and success criterion stay fixed but access does not. We transform eighteen customer-service tasks into three settings: direct access, one known intermediary, and six role-isolated participants whose capabilities must be discovered. Across 864 trials with four models, social access reduced success for every model; the pre-specified intervals excluded zero for two. The latest tested model, gpt-5.6-sol, achieved the highest social-access success at 0.65, a 0.11 decrease from centralized indirect access with an interval that included zero. Exploratory comparisons separated five of six model pairs under social access, while neither centralized setting separated any at this sample size. In post-hoc task-blocked tests, three pairwise interaction $p$-values remained significant after multiplicity adjustment. A reference-relative reader associates the wider gaps with failures to obtain needed information. Because the data cannot distinguish ineffective requests by the evaluated agent from inaccurate replies by simulated participants, the reader's labels describe where trajectories stopped, not why models differed.

When Should Service Agents Reconsider? Difficulty-Routed Control in Customer-Service Operations

Autonomous customer-service agents are shifting from conversational interfaces toward operational execution roles: they retrieve firm records, apply service policies, and execute backend writes such as refunds, cancellations, exchanges, order modifications, and reservation changes. This shift creates a service-control problem: firms must keep routine service fast and low-friction while preventing operational errors on requests where customer instructions, policy constraints, firm records, and backend writes interact. We propose a difficulty-routed service-control architecture that asks when service agents should reconsider before acting. A lightweight router keeps routine sessions on a low-cost baseline path and routes operationally coupled sessions to an escalated workflow. The escalated path uses conflict-aware communication and write-triggered reconsideration to concentrate deliberation and safeguards before consequential backend writes, rather than applying additional control uniformly across all service sessions. We evaluate the architecture on human-verified retail and airline tasks from $τ^{2}$-bench. In retail, the method improves reliability consistently on service requests with operational conflict. Routing evidence shows that stronger control is directed toward conflicted requests rather than broadly applied to routine ones. Dialogue and tool-use profiles suggest that gains do not come from indiscriminate interaction expansion or broader tool chains; instead, added turns and tool calls support evidence gathering, write separation, and pre-write reconsideration. Case-level evidence shows that the escalated workflow preserves fallback plans, binds retrieved records to the correct action, sequences writes, and decomposes multi-entity requests. Airline results extend the same service-control logic to reservation operations.

Spam and Sentiment Detection in Arabic Tweets Using MARBERT Model

Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is among the most popular companies in Saudi Arabia, with many customers. Yet, there is still a big room for improvement in users' satisfaction. Social media is the most robust platform to gauge users' satisfaction and determine their sentiments and critics. Twitter is among the most popular social media platform in this regard. STC customers prefer to use Twitter to write their feedback because it's a fast way to get responses due to the STC customer services account. One way to achieve customer demands and improve customer service is using the Sentiment Analysis tool. Sentiment Analysis on Twitter is highly used because of the significant number of tweets and the different opinions. Likewise, Deep learning is the best existing Sentiment Analysis method, and it has diverse models. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model is one of the deep learning models which have achieved excellent results in Sentiment Analysis for Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is mainly investigated in the English language. However, for Arabic, there is a significant gap to be filled. This study trained the proposed model using MARBERT and measured the performance using f1-score, precision, and recall metrics. We trained the model with an Arabic dataset of 24,513 tweets, including 1,437 positive, 13,828 negative, 5,694 neutral, 1,221 sarcasm, and 2,297 indeterminate tweets. The main goal is to analyze the tweets and get the sentiment to improve STC customer service. The proposed scheme is promising in terms of accuracy in contrast to existing techniques in the literature.

LedgerAgent: Structured State for Policy-Adherent Tool-Calling Agents

Policy-adherent tool-calling agents in customer-service domains must maintain task states across turns while calling tools and obeying domain policies. Task states consist of relevant facts, identifiers, constraints, and conditions observed through user interaction and tool calls. In standard agents, task states are not represented separately. Observations, tool returns, and policy instructions are placed in the prompt, leaving agents to reconstruct the relevant states from the prompt each time they decide what to do next. This design makes state management implicit, creating two common failure modes. An agent may retrieve the right facts but later ground its decision in stale, missing, or incorrect information; and a syntactically valid tool call may still violate a domain policy that depends on the current task state. We introduce \textsc{LedgerAgent}, an inference-time method for tool-calling agents that maintains observed task states in a separate ledger and renders the states into the prompt. The ledger is also used to check state-dependent policy constraints before environment-changing tool calls are executed, blocking policy violations. Across four customer-service domains and a mixed panel of open- and closed-weight models, \textsc{LedgerAgent} improves average pass\textasciicircum{}k over a standard prompt-based tool-calling approach, with the largest gains under stricter multi-trial consistency metrics.

Declarative Skills for AI Agents in Knowledge-Grounded Tool-Use Workflows

We study orchestration mechanisms for tool-using AI agents in realistic customer-service workflows over an unstructured knowledge base. We argue that declarative agents -- AI agents equipped with natural-language skill files appended to the system prompt -- are an effective orchestration paradigm. Concretely, we compare (i) a DeclarativeAgent that reads three domain-specific skill files at inference time and decides its own control flow, (ii) an ImperativeAgent based on a programmatic state machine with explicit phases, and (iii) an unscaffolded baseline agent modeled after the $τ$-Knowledge benchmark agent. Our ImperativeAgent is motivated by externalised-control inference as in Recursive Language Models and graph-based orchestration frameworks. We formalise the three agents as policy classes within a decentralised partially-observable Markov decision process and analyse their information-theoretic and structural properties; we then test the predicted differences empirically on five language models and two retrieval regimes. Our results show that retrieval quality is a dominant bottleneck for AI agents: when evidence is incomplete or skewed, all agents degrade substantially, and skill files cannot recover lost performance. Under high-quality retrieval, however, declarative skills consistently improve accuracy on procedural tasks and reduce orchestration errors, while the imperative state machine's brittleness does not reliably improve task success or compliance.