Papers
arxiv:2602.20424

Implicit Intelligence -- Evaluating Agents on What Users Don't Say

Published on Feb 23
· Submitted by
taesiri
on Feb 25
Authors:
,

Abstract

AI agents struggle to interpret implicitly specified real-world requests that require contextual reasoning beyond explicit instructions, as demonstrated by an evaluation framework using interactive YAML-defined worlds.

AI-generated summary

Real-world requests to AI agents are fundamentally underspecified. Natural human communication relies on shared context and unstated constraints that speakers expect listeners to infer. Current agentic benchmarks test explicit instruction-following but fail to evaluate whether agents can reason about implicit requirements spanning accessibility needs, privacy boundaries, catastrophic risks, and contextual constraints. We present Implicit Intelligence, an evaluation framework testing whether AI agents can move beyond prompt-following to become genuine goal-fulfillers, paired with Agent-as-a-World (AaW), a harness where interactive worlds are defined in human-readable YAML files and simulated by language models. Our scenarios feature apparent simplicity in user requests, hidden complexity in correct solutions, and discoverability of constraints through environmental exploration. Evaluating 16 frontier and open-weight models across 205 scenarios, we find that even the best-performing model achieves only 48.3% scenario pass rate, revealing substantial room for improvement in bridging the gap between literal instruction-following and human-like contextual reasoning.

Community

Sign up or log in to comment

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2602.20424 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2602.20424 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2602.20424 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.