Repair the Amplifier, Not the Symptom: Stable World-Model Correction for Agent Rollouts

Abstract

As agent planning moves from short tool chains toward persistent workflows with thousands or tens of thousands of steps, failures will occur inside large planning graphs rather than in isolated predictions. Replanning the entire graph after every mistake is neither computationally realistic nor desirable: full-graph replay consumes large context budgets, exposes the LLM to many irrelevant symptoms, and can degrade long-context retrieval. This paper studies the missing component in such systems: a world-model corrector that repairs the failed planning graph in place. We compare two families of correctors. The first is the common engineering approach: scan nodes and edges, choose a suspicious local region, and ask an LLM to repair it. We implement strong engineering LLM correctors and find that they can help, especially when given very large contexts. The second family is our approach, WM-SAR (World-Model Subgraph Amplification Repair): instead of scanning for visible symptoms, it works backward from subgraph amplification, identifies the nodes and edges that keep re-amplifying error, and sends only that causal subgraph to the LLM. Across graph simulations and LLM repair experiments, WM-SAR substantially outperforms engineering correctors under realistic token budgets, achieves near-whole-graph stabilization with a compact region, and gives the LLM a cleaner repair target.