Research reveals that activation interventions struggle to achieve conditional reuse in tool usage models.
The paper was posted on arXiv on October 26, 2026 (ID 2610.31686), and, based on the Qwen3.5-27B model, it systematically examined the impact of activation interventions on “conditional reuse” capabilities in tool-use tasks that depend on temporal or permission-based eligibility assessments. The experiments showed that while the intervention significantly improved the accuracy of target selection, it failed to generalize in scenarios involving fact‑based and identifier‑recombination tasks, and it did not enhance independent judgments of candidate eligibility.
Why it matters：This study is the first to clearly distinguish among three types of capabilities—“goal-selection control,” “condition-sensitive judgment,” and “complete-action correctness”—and demonstrates that merely optimizing output answers is insufficient to ensure that a model truly understands and reuses the conditions set by an intervention (such as time or permissions), thereby offering methodological implications for trustworthy tool invocation and the design of controllable AI systems.