Thinking Is Not Telling: Information Disclosure in User-Service LLM Agents

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Authors: Jiatong Li, Changdae Oh, Hyeong Kyu Choi, Jindong Wang, Sharon Li
Cited by: 0

Abstract

User-engaged LLM agents increasingly operate in service scenarios where task success depends on coordination between the agent, the user, and a stateful environment. In such interactions, the agent often has access to task policies, tool results, and environment states that the user does not observe. This makes agent-user communication a central component of task completion. In this work, we study a communication-level failure mode of user-service agents: user-invisible reasoning does not necessarily translate into timely user-facing information disclosure. We introduce information disclosure as a measurable communication mechanism, covering state corrections, available options, constraints, consequences, and proactively retrieved environment information. We use this perspective to analyze the widely used user-invisible ``think'' tool, which allows agents to reason internally before responding or acting. Across five models and three user-service scenarios, we first show that enforced thinking has unstable utility. We then analyze response scaling under different think efforts and find that more internal thinking does not reliably translate into richer user-facing communication. Using evidence-grounded probing and turn-level counterfactual intervention, we show that injecting golden decision-relevant information produces the clearest improvement in First Edit Correction Rate, outperforming verbosity and direct think-content controls. This indicates that missing disclosure can causally affect the agent's immediate downstream environment-edit behavior. We further find that a lightweight disclosure-aware prompt mitigates degradation from enforced thinking. These results suggest that the key challenge is not simply making agents think more, but ensuring that private reasoning and environment knowledge are externalized as timely, user-facing information disclosure.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Speech and dialogue systems Natural Language Processing Techniques AI-based Problem Solving and Planning

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
8 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint