Agentic Abstention: Do Agents Know When to Stop Instead of Act?
May 1, 2026·
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1 min read
Han Luo
Equal contribution
Bingbing Wen
Equal contribution
,Lucy Lu Wang
Abstract
We study agentic abstention, the ability of tool-using LLM agents to recognize when a task is infeasible, contradictory, or missing unrecoverable information and stop instead of continuing to act.
Type
Publication
NeurIPS 2026 Submission
We study agentic abstention: when tool-using LLM agents should recognize that a task is infeasible, contradictory, or missing information that cannot be recovered, and stop instead of spending additional turns on futile actions.
