Abstract
Operational reports carry two clocks: when an event happened and when its report arrived; later reports can revise earlier ones. A foundation-model component that maintains the state supported by the reports visible at a cutoff, then rolls a supplied scenario forward, can be helped by exact code before it, after it or inside the call, or asked to reason harder. We ask which remedy removes which error, for which models, on an exactly solvable lost-sales inventory environment: 36,672 independently rescored requests over twelve configurations of closed and open-weight models, with a forced-answer-call interface as a control and protocols frozen before the calls. Weak models fail in separable ways. Canonical input removes report-selection error, exact continuation removes rollout error, neither repairs the other, and which error dominates differs by model; strong models are at ceiling on raw reports. Asking for more reasoning is no substitute and can depend on the interface: under a forced answer call high effort collapses GPT-5.4 mini and DeepSeek V4 Pro, which gain or hold under automatic choice; on its provider the forced call disables reasoning for DeepSeek V4 Flash; and at high effort gpt-oss exhausts its output budget. The contribution is a controlled component diagnostic, released with every request, and evidence that for some model and provider pairs the tool-calling interface confounds reasoning evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14671
