Toward a Science of Intent: Closure Gaps and Delegation Envelopes for Open-World AI Agents
arXiv cs.AI / 4/29/2026
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Key Points
- The paper argues that current approaches to “verifiable intelligence” (time-to-solution via learned structure/test-time search, and learned runtimes storing computation/memory/I-O in model state) still fail to explain deployment challenges in real open institutions.
- It proposes “intent compilation,” transforming partially specified human purpose into inspectable artifacts that explicitly bind and constrain execution.
- The authors distinguish closed-world solvers from open-world agents, where verification is distributed across semantic, evidentiary, procedural, and institutional dimensions.
- They formalize remaining uncertainty in open settings as a “closure-gap vector,” introduce “delegation envelopes” as pre-authorized action-space regions, and separate “misclosure” from “undersearch.”
- The work outlines benchmark metrics to evaluate when closure-focused interventions outperform simply adding more inference-time search.


