While deep research systems address interactive information-seeking needs impressively, their real-world deployments face latency and resource-consumption challenges. We present FrankenReport, an interface for long-form knowledge-seeking report generation that supports adaptive early exiting per section: it evaluates intermediate outputs during generation and predicts whether further targeted computation will yield significant quality gains. In a simulation study, FrankenReport outperforms random allocation baselines by a large margin (up to 4×) under low budgets and smoothly recovers full-pipeline quality as the budget grows, showing that future quality gains are predictable from intermediate drafts. Through experiments and user studies, we further show that despite varying preferences across users and topics, FrankenReport adapts to simple, natural user feedback as efficiently as methods requiring much costlier supervision such as generated drafts and explicit rationales.

Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of models, we propose a novel class of model-internal confidence estimators (MICE) to better assess confidence when calling tools. MICE first decodes from each intermediate layer of the language model using logit lens and then computes similarity scores between each layer’s generation and the final output. These features are fed into a learned probabilistic classifier to assess confidence in the decoded output. On the simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models, we find that MICE beats or matches the baselines on smoothed expected calibration error. Using MICE confidences to determine whether to call a tool significantly improves over strong baselines on a new metric, expected tool-calling utility. Further experiments show that MICE is sample-efficient, can generalize zero-shot to unseen APIs, and results in higher tool-calling utility in scenarios with varying risk levels. Our code is open source, available at https://github.com/microsoft/mice_for_cats.