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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.22280 · updated 2026-10-18

LEASH: Uncertainty-Aware Weak-to-Strong Escalation and Oversight for Computer-Use Agents

First page of LEASH: Uncertainty-Aware Weak-to-Strong Escalation and Oversight for Computer-Use Agents
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.22280Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

The method replaces always-on frontier-model execution (or random/heuristic escalation) with a router that runs a cheap weak agent by default and escalates to a strong model only when the weak model's hidden states resemble past failed trajectories, plus a shadow observer that monitors the black-box strong agent after handoff. It costs maintaining a bank of successful and failed trajectory activations, per-step hidden-state comparisons, and the engineering complexity of a three-layer routing pipeline, though the estimator reuses existing activations so no extra forward pass or monitor training is needed. It can fail if the weak model's latent uncertainty is miscalibrated for a new task distribution, if logged trajectories do not cover the deployment domain, or if the strong agent's errors are not detectable from black-box outputs alone.

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Compare against

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  3. Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.
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What to measure

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source-linked claims
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Why it was shortlisted

The technical change, research area, and reason it entered the archive.

recommendation
test
research area
multi-agent orchestration
technical change
Uncertainty-driven weak-to-strong model escalation
published
2026-10-15

Cost-aware escalation directly fits a constrained budget, but the reported gains are specific to OSWorld computer-use tasks and must be validated on the reader's own workload before adoption.

About the technical core

Equations have not been fetched yet.

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Inspect the original paper

Claims and evidence

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    The method replaces always-on frontier-model execution (or random/heuristic escalation) with a router that runs a cheap weak agent by default and escalates to a strong model only when the weak model's hidden states resemble past failed trajectories, plus a shadow observer that monitors the black-box strong agent after handoff. It costs maintaining a bank of successful and failed trajectory activations, per-step hidden-state comparisons, and the engineering complexity of a three-layer routing pipeline, though the estimator reuses existing activations so no extra forward pass or monitor training is needed. It can fail if the weak model's latent uncertainty is miscalibrated for a new task distribution, if logged trajectories do not cover the deployment domain, or if the strong agent's errors are not detectable from black-box outputs alone.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    On OSWorld, LEASH with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B reaches 73.66% task success at $0.4117 per task, matching always-on Claude Opus 5 (72.90%) while reducing inference cost by 19.2%; it outperforms random escalation by 6.55-11.94 success points at matched escalation rates.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source

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quality

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compute and memory

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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reproducibility

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Continue the investigation

A reading guide for multi-agent orchestration.

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What to inspect

Which assumptions does the proposed method need, and where might your workload violate them?

Plan a fair comparison

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Inside the paper

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2610.22280

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