Trajectory Abstraction for the Science of Language Agent Behavior
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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence
arXiv:2610.09237 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Oct 2026]
Title:Trajectory Abstraction for the Science of Language Agent Behavior
Authors:Tianqiang Yan
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Abstract:Scientific studies of language agents need behavioral variables that support hypotheses across tasks and models. We formulate this research problem as learning and testing a hierarchy of trajectory abstractions. A concrete recursive procedure first measures role- and phase-indexed events, proposes temporally constrained relations, and tests their stability across conditions. It then constructs episode-level motif variables from selected relations and repeats the analysis on those variables. Explicit measurement functions connect every abstraction level to the original trajectories. Observations and randomized protocol experiments assess the resulting hypotheses, while comparisons between intervention realizations determine whether an abstraction should be retained, refined, or restricted. We derive a finite-depth bound for accepted reductions, identify protocol effects on fixed abstractions, and characterize realization disagreement and composition of abstraction error. A finite-sample test makes projected intervention consistency operational, and constructed examples illustrate motif construction and abstraction refinement. The formulation distinguishes this experimental approach from semantic taxonomies, qualitative theory induction, and behavior-model recovery. It specifies a proposed research procedure for discovering generalizable behavioral hypotheses, with literature-relative novelty assessed separately from model-relative surprise.
| Comments: | (Work in Progress) 13 pages, 2 figures |
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.09237 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2610.09237v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09237
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Trajectory Abstraction for the Science of Language Agent Behavior, by Tianqiang Yan
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