Repair the Amplifier, Not the Symptom: Stable World-Model Correction for Agent Rollouts

Abstract

Long-horizon language agents increasingly maintain executable world models in the form of planning graphs, where tool calls, validators, memory updates, recovery branches, and final answers are connected by typed dependencies. When a rollout fails, repairing the most visible error can leave the underlying error-amplification path intact, while replaying the full graph is expensive and difficult for long-context models to use reliably. We study world-model correction: selecting a compact subgraph of a failed planning graph whose repair stabilizes subsequent rollouts. We first instantiate a strong family of engineering correctors, including pointwise error scans, TopK and window selection, local graph expansion, cascade repair, and full-context LLM repair. We then propose WM-SAR, a spectral subgraph repair method that estimates node-edge amplification, greedily grows a connected repair region by marginal residual-spectral relief, and sends only this region to an LLM for root-cause repair. Theoretically, we connect residual spectral radius to rollout error and planning regret, motivating repair as stabilization rather than attribution alone. Across synthetic calling-tree graphs, benchmark-inspired agent topologies, and cross-model LLM repair experiments, WM-SAR achieves stronger long-horizon stabilization and root-cause recovery under compact token budgets, matching much larger repair contexts while exposing the LLM to a cleaner causal subgraph.