LLM Agents Show Gap Between Knowing and Doing in Supply Chains.

Sagar Deb, Ashwanth Krishnan· July 16, 2026 View original

Summary

A new benchmark, STOCKTAKE, evaluates LLM agents on multi-week supply-chain tasks, revealing a significant "knowing-doing gap" where agents detect problems but fail to act effectively. It measures both state estimation and control separately using a fair oracle.

Researchers have introduced STOCKTAKE, a novel 26-week supply-chain replenishment benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the performance of large language model (LLM) agents. This benchmark addresses a critical challenge in agent evaluation: distinguishing between an agent's inability to correctly perceive the world (state estimation) and its failure to act appropriately even when it has correct information (the knowing-doing gap). STOCKTAKE employs a factored partially observable Markov decision process, allowing for the computation of a "fair oracle" policy that operates on the same observation stream as the agent. This enables separate measurement of an agent's skill score, its ability to detect hidden failures, and its knowing-doing rate. Initial evaluations of models like Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.4 revealed that while agents can detect a high percentage of hidden failures, their overall skill scores vary widely, with some performing worse than a symptom-blind baseline. The study highlights a dual failure mechanism: agents frequently stock out even after correctly diagnosing stress, indicating an under-response. Conversely, some models exhibit costly responses that exceed the value they aim to protect. This suggests that the knowing-doing gap is complex, involving both insufficient and inefficient actions.

Why it matters

Professionals deploying or developing LLM agents need to understand that high diagnostic accuracy does not guarantee effective action, especially in complex, long-horizon tasks like supply chain management. This research provides a framework to identify and address these critical performance gaps.

How to implement this in your domain

  1. 1Adopt structured evaluation benchmarks like STOCKTAKE for LLM agents in critical business processes.
  2. 2Design agent architectures that explicitly separate perception/diagnosis from action planning and execution.
  3. 3Implement monitoring systems to track both an agent's stated beliefs and its actual operational outcomes.
  4. 4Develop targeted training or fine-tuning strategies to improve agents' response mechanisms, not just their diagnostic capabilities.

Who benefits

Supply ChainLogisticsManufacturingRetailE-commerce

Key takeaways

  • LLM agents can accurately diagnose problems but still fail to act effectively.
  • The "knowing-doing gap" is a significant challenge for autonomous agents.
  • New benchmarks are crucial for evaluating both perception and action capabilities.
  • Agent failures can stem from both under-response and overly costly responses.

Original post by Sagar Deb, Ashwanth Krishnan

"arXiv:2607.13618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed. On such tasks the final cost cannot say why an agent failed: it may have misread the world, or read i…"

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Originally posted by Sagar Deb, Ashwanth Krishnan on X · view source

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