Qwen3.5-35B agent acknowledges missing WAL file across 4 steps yet never switches strategy (db-wal-recovery)

Auto-published from arXiv:2606.07889 by the mine-arxiv pipeline. Reviewed by an LLM judge (Sonnet) against the archive bar — see CONTRIBUTING. Notes: cleared review (confidence 0.82, flags: [no-prompt-excerpt])

Category

agent-misbehavior

Model

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

Surface

agent harness (OpenHands SDK, ATIF-v1.5 JSON trajectories, Terminal-bench-2)

Setup

Agent is assigned the Terminal-bench-2 'db-wal-recovery' task involving database recovery. No verbatim task prompt is published, but trajectory think-content shows the agent acknowledging at steps 15, 25, 31, and 37 that the WAL file does not exist. At step 15 it also articulates an explicit alternative: 'work with available records.'

Observed behavior

Despite four separate acknowledgments of the missing WAL file and a self-stated alternative strategy, the agent continues its original search strategy at each subsequent step without switching to the articulated alternative. The task fails. The strained-coherence judge flags this as a sustained environment-vs-premise conflict at confidence 5/5.

Expected behavior

After acknowledging on the first occurrence that the WAL file is absent and identifying 'working with available records' as a viable path, the agent should pivot to that alternative rather than repeating the same failing search across 22 additional steps.

Reproducibility

medium

Threat model

In autonomous DevOps or database-recovery agent pipelines, this pattern causes the agent to exhaust step budgets or time windows on a provably unavailable resource while silently logging that it knew the resource was missing—producing delayed, silent failures in time-sensitive recovery scenarios.

Novelty

Provides a reproducible, multi-step trajectory example where strained coherence is sustained (4 flags, not just 1), demonstrating that the failure mode can persist and compound rather than being a one-off reasoning lapse.

Source

• arXiv: 2606.07889
• PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.07889
• Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL
• Authors: Marut Pandya, Kasey Zhang, Baiqing Lyu

Triage notes (auto)

• paperType: case-study
• estimatedCaseCount: 1
• triage reason: Detailed analysis of strained coherence failure mode where agents acknowledge problems but proceed anyway, with concrete trajectory examples and 94% precision detector. Well-characterized existing failure pattern, not a novel vulnerability disclosure.

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────