Distinguish or Homogenize: Last-Chance Policy Identification and Risk-Budgeted Recovery under Irreversible Resource Depletion

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.36741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Under irreversible resource depletion, an agent can spend resources to distinguish among latent fault models, or to change the system state so that the remaining models admit a common acceptable continuation--at which point further diagnosis becomes unnecessary. This distinguish-or-homogenize principle identifies a path that existing frameworks for identification, planning, and diagnosis do not make explicit: prior formulations treat the mapping from fault models to acceptable policies as a given, whereas LCPI makes it a function of the agent's own actions. We formalize this principle through Last-Chance Policy Identification (LCPI), where correctness is evaluated at the state the agent reaches rather than at the initial state. The Last Ident