[
    {
        "id": "osp-15450",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "title": "When the Governor Becomes the Disturbance: Control-Generated Disturbance and Cost-Aware Backoff in Governed Tool-Using Agents",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Ziegler",
                "given": "Veronique"
            }
        ],
        "URL": "https://omanscience.com/en/articles/when-the-governor-becomes-the-disturbance-control-generated-disturbance-and-cost-aware-backoff-in-governed-tool-using-agents",
        "language": "en",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    2026
                ]
            ]
        },
        "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."
    }
]