Nimay Ballal
Author directory2026
Grounding First: Auditing a Structured Recovery Wrapper for Local Open-Weight Reflexion Agents
Nimay Ballal | Badri Prasad V R
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Nimay Ballal | Badri Prasad V R
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
We audit how action interfaces and recovery mechanisms shape the evaluation of local open-weight Reflexion agents on 134 ALFWorld valid-unseen tasks. The analysis covers six primary admissible-action conditions and historical free-text runs across three model deployments. We organize the audit around four implementation contracts: action execution, recovery triggering, treatment changes, and outcome construction. Historical free-text runs show substantial invalid-output fallback, while designated admissible-parser fallback remains below 1.1 percent; this contrast does not by itself establish parser faithfulness. Structured Recovery Prompting (SRP) combines a recovery prompt with counter resets and relaxed termination limits. Its implementation-reported task-success differences range from 0.00 to +6.72 percentage points and are smaller than the baseline contrast between the two Qwen model sizes. The available evidence supports descriptive comparisons rather than an isolated recovery-prompt effect. The audit identifies incomplete repeat detection and termination-based success labeling, highlighting the importance of trigger coverage and outcome definitions when interpreting recovery results. The contribution is a focused diagnostic audit that connects aggregate performance to implementation behavior and provides concrete checks for evaluating recovery in the studied agents.