Can LLMs in Draft-Verify-Revise Pipelines Resolve Deictic Ambiguity?

In a long conversation, an LLM can produce a plausible continuation that rests on premises the conversation has already abandoned. No runtime check ties its output to what the conversation has established, a gap that context-manipulation attacks on deployed agents exploit. We close this gap with a runtime verifier: an LLM Interpreter classifies each utterance into one of eight epistemic operations, and a symbolic engine applies them to a dependency map that records what every claim rests on and whether it still stands. Whether a continuation is grounded reduces to a walk over the map, linear in its size, with no LLM call. Retraction propagates through the same map with a conflict-free guarantee, flagging exactly the conclusions that lose support. On ReviseQA for belief revision and MemoryAgentBench's fact-consolidation split, two third-party benchmarks where earlier premises are superseded, the verifier leads a budget-matched retrieval baseline across five QA models and lifts MemoryAgentBench single-hop accuracy from 0.46--0.95 to 0.93--0.98. With the verifier, even the 7B model overtakes unaided GPT-4o. These runs feed the engine the benchmarks' own structured updates. When a GPT-4o Interpreter extracts every update from raw text instead, accuracy is statistically unchanged. Per-query cost is flat in conversation length, prompts staying near 0.8k tokens where full context reaches 114k and retraction queries under a microsecond at 2000 turns.

LLM-as-Judge systems are widely deployed for automated evaluation, yet practitioners lack reliable methods to know when a judge's verdict should be trusted. Token log-probabilities, the standard post-hoc confidence signal, are unavailable for many commercial LLMs and, even when accessible, saturate above 0.999 with structured JSON output. We introduce VERDI (VERification-Decomposed Inference), a method that extracts confidence from the reasoning trace a structured judge already produces, with no additional inference calls. VERDI decomposes each verification-style evaluation into sub-checks and derives three structural signals: Step-Verdict Alignment, Claim-Level Margin, and Evidence Grounding Score. We combine them with Platt-scaled logistic regression. On three public benchmarks, VERDI achieves AUROC 0.72-0.91 on GPT-4.1-mini and 0.66-0.80 on GPT-5.4-mini. On Qwen3.5-4B/9B/27B, where answer-token logprobs are anti-calibrated (higher confidence on errors, AUROC 0.32-0.49), VERDI achieves 0.56-0.70. We additionally validate on a production system with eight rubrics (AUROC 0.73-0.88 on factual rubrics), demonstrate cross-model transfer (AUROC 0.66-0.69), and show that a 33M-parameter NLI (Natural Language Inference) model provides a scalable alternative to regex extraction.

Dialogue failures in language models are usually framed as memory failures: context too long, summaries lossy, a constraint forgotten. We argue this misses a deeper problem: in many conversations the model does not forget, it commits too early. An ambiguous early turn collapses into a single hidden interpretation, and later clarification is filtered through that commitment. We call this early posterior collapse: unresolved user intent collapsing into a committed task state before ambiguity is resolved. We study it with controlled dialogue tasks in writing, planning, and coding using Gemini-2.5-Pro and Gemini-2.5-Flash. Across thousands of trials, the same information in different orders yields different outcomes, even when the final dialogue contains equivalent task-relevant information. This order effect suggests later clarification is treated as extra context rather than a corrective signal: it refines a stale task state without invalidating it. Coding tasks are especially vulnerable, suggesting early assumptions get embedded in structured artifacts such as interfaces and control flow. Standard prompting and memory strategies do not reliably help: summaries can collapse ambiguity, and chain-of-thought can reduce explicit wrong commitment in reasoning traces without improving final task success. These findings motivate uncertainty-preserving state management. If assistants cannot let go of early interpretations, robustness cannot rely on post hoc correction alone; it must keep ambiguous early turns from hardening into one task state. Assistants should hold tentative hypotheses while ambiguity remains, ask before executing when high-impact ambiguity persists, and rebuild from a revised state when later evidence invalidates an earlier reading. Rather than one prompting fix, we aim to redirect research for interactive LLMs from retaining more context toward preserving uncertainty.