Abstract
Supervisory governors can interfere with the tool-using agents they regulate. We study this possibility in a controlled file-recovery environment where increases in regulatory intensity trigger experimentally imposed tool failures. A cost-blind governor can turn these failures into persistent blocking that prevents task completion. We compare this governor with a backoff rule that reduces intervention probability using a moving average of known induced events. On a hand-coded stochastic-policy agent, the failure pattern appears under both result replacement and execution of corrupted tool arguments. For the persistent policy, adaptive backoff improves completion relative to a fixed weak governor with approximately matched intervention frequency. A Gemini 2.5 Flash experiment comprising 576 episodes across 6 tasks also shows reduced blocking and improved completion under backoff; among the tested settings, intermediate backoff strength achieves the highest observed aggregate success. These results identify an interaction between intervention cost and persistent action blocking, together with a possible mitigation. The cost mechanisms are imposed and their induced events are directly observable to the backoff rule; applicability beyond this controlled environment remains an empirical question.
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Cite this article
APA 7
Ziegler, V. (2026). When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents
MLA 9
Ziegler, Veronique. "When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents.
Chicago (author–date)
Ziegler, Veronique. 2026. "When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents.
Harvard
Ziegler, V. (2026) 'When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents.
Vancouver
Ziegler V. When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents
IEEE
V. Ziegler, "When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents.