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arXiv · 2605.18882

To Call or Not to Call: Diagnosing Intrinsic Over-Calling Bias in LLM Agents

Wei Shi·Ziheng Peng·Sihang Li·Xiting Wang·Xiang Wang·Mengnan Du·Na Zou
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Abstract

LLM agents exhibit a consistent tendency to over-call, invoking tools even in situations where none is needed. On the When2Call benchmark, six models from three families show high call accuracy but much lower no-call accuracy, leaving overall accuracy in the 55%-70% range. We trace this to an Intrinsic Bias Hypothesis (IBH): the call/no-call decision mapping carries an activation-independent call offset, so the model favors call even at activation parity. Using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), we recover behavior-aligned feature bases for the call/no_call decision, reduce them to a signed activation margin, and estimate the offset directly. Across all six models, the model is decision-neutral only when no_call activation outweighs call activation, consistent with IBH. We then causally test IBH with Adaptive Margin-Calibrated Steering (AMCS), a closed-form counter-bias shift along SAE decoder directions. Cancelling the diagnosed offset mitigates over-calling and improves overall accuracy with a negligible drop in call accuracy. Our work recasts over-calling from an empirical phenomenon into a mechanistic object amenable to causal correction. Code is available at https://github.com/SKURA502/agent-sae/.

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Wei Shi, Ziheng Peng, Sihang Li, Xiting Wang, Xiang Wang, Mengnan Du, Na Zou. 2026-05-16. To Call or Not to Call: Diagnosing Intrinsic Over-Calling Bias in LLM Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18882

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