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BALAR: A Bayesian Agentic Loop for Active Reasoning

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BALAR is a task-agnostic algorithm that enables structured multi-turn interaction between LLMs and users by maintaining beliefs over latent states and selecting clarifying questions via mutual information maximization. It achieves significant accuracy gains on detective, puzzle, and clinical diagnosis benchmarks.

SourcearXiv AIAuthor: Aymen Echarghaoui, Dongxia Wu, Emily B. Fox
BALAR: A Bayesian Agentic Loop for Active Reasoning
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[2605.05386] BALAR : A Bayesian Agentic Loop for Active Reasoning

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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2605.05386 (cs)

[Submitted on 6 May 2026]

Title:BALAR : A Bayesian Agentic Loop for Active Reasoning

Authors:Aymen Echarghaoui, Dongxia Wu, Emily B. Fox

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Abstract:Large language models increasingly operate in interactive settings where solving a task requires multiple rounds of information exchange with a user. However, most current systems treat dialogue reactively and lack a principled mechanism to reason about what information is missing and which question should be asked next. We propose BALAR (Bayesian Agentic Loop for Active Reasoning), a task-agnostic outer-loop algorithm that requires no fine-tuning and enables structured multi-turn interaction between an LLM agent and a user. BALAR maintains a structured belief over latent states, selects clarifying questions by maximizing expected mutual information, and dynamically expands its state representation when the current one proves insufficient. We evaluate BALAR on three diverse benchmarks: AR-Bench-DC (detective cases), AR-Bench-SP (thinking puzzles), and iCraft-MD (clinical diagnosis). BALAR significantly outperforms all baselines across all three benchmarks, with $14.6\%$ higher accuracy on AR-Bench-DC, $38.5\%$ on AR-Bench-SP, and $30.5\%$ on iCraft-MD.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.05386 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2605.05386v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05386

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Aymen Echarghaoui [view email] [v1] Wed, 6 May 2026 19:18:59 UTC (692 KB)

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Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersIntermediate

Key points

  • BALAR requires no fine-tuning and is task-agnostic.
  • It uses a Bayesian belief state and active question selection.
  • Outperforms baselines by 14.6% on detective cases, 38.5% on puzzles, and 30.5% on clinical diagnosis.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.