When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents
arXiv:2606.23937v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.
[2606.23937] When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents
[Submitted on 22 Jun 2026]
Title:When Retrieval Metrics Mislead: Measuring Policy Signal in Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents
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Abstract:Exact-match retrieval recall is often used as a proxy for whether a retriever supplies useful policy context to a downstream decision model. We test this proxy for pre-action policy classification in tau-bench using Qwen2.5-3B/7B classifiers. Under gold-policy conditioning, a compact structured state improves macro-F1 over raw trajectories by 0.13-0.17 after tuning. We then replace the benchmark-designated policy clause with the top-ranked clause retrieved from decision-time context. Although the exact governing clause is retrieved at rank 1 for only 7% of airline states, the primary 3B classifier obtains macro-F1 0.58 with retrieved clauses versus 0.60 with gold clauses (Delta=-0.02, task-cluster 95% CI [-0.23,+0.21]); mismatched-policy and no-policy controls score 0.32 and 0.21. We do not detect a macro-F1 difference between retrieved and gold clauses in this configuration, although the interval remains too wide to establish non-inferiority. The same qualitative pattern appears with a second retriever and at 7B, while varying across fine-tuning configurations. These results indicate that exact-match clause recall can underestimate downstream policy utility in this benchmark setting, motivating evaluation with retrieved policies in the classification loop rather than recall alone.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.23937 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.23937v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.23937
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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From: Tianyu Ding [view email] [v1] Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:57:11 UTC (78 KB)
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