When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 22 May 2026] When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems Zehao Wang, Shilong Jin, Zhao Cao, Lanjun Wang LLM-based multi-agent systems can fail even when planned actions are executed correctly because agents may misjudge their knowledge when evaluating plan feasibility, a phenomenon we term epistemic miscalibration in planning. Unlike execution errors, epistemic miscalibration is latent during planning, as generated plans can remain self-consistent and executable without observable errors; the miscalibration is also dynamic, as new information can alter feasibility assessments, potentially obscuring past miscalibration signals and causing them to recur over time. To address this, we propose the Epistemic Planning Calibration Agentic Workflow (EPC-AW), which assesses whether plans remain supported under varying information conditions rather than directly verifying feasibility. EPC-AW employs Information-consistency-based Plan Selection, selecting plans whose evaluations are stable across agents, together with Consistency-guided Epistemic State Refinement to adapt calibration over time by leveraging past discrepancies to guide future planning. Experiments show that EPC-AW improves system-level success by an average of 9.75%. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) Cite as: arXiv:2605.23414 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.23414v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.23414 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Zehao Wang [view email] [v1] Fri, 22 May 2026 09:24:12 UTC (166 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)