Quick test I ran last week that bothered me more than I expected. made a table of pure noise. random floats, columns named c1 through c20, no structure nothing real in it at all. then asked a few models to describe the dataset.
all of them described it. one told me it looked like sensor readings from manufacturing equipment and suggested which columns might be correlated. there is nothing in there, it's rand().
which is correct behaviour for a language model, it completes, that's the job. but if your agent's first move on an unfamiliar table is to ask a model what the table is, you get a confident answer whether or not there's anything to be confident about, and nothing in the output distinguishes the two cases. no error, no hedge, same tone.
I've tried asking for a confidence number alongside the description and it just makes up a confidence number. tried a second model to check the first, they agree with each other.
disclosure before this sounds like a pitch I work at SchemaLabs and this is the thing we work on, so I'm not coming at it neutral. our model is trained on tables rather than text and on that noise file it returns no domain identified, which is the behaviour I want, but I've only tested it on files I made myself and I don't fully trust my own test design. "feed it garbage and see if it admits it" is crude. I can't find anything better written down.
So, two things. does anyone have a real method for testing whether a model actually recognises a table versus pattern matching a plausible description of one. and in your own agents, is there a path where the agent stops and says the source is unreadable, or does it always produce something
happy to share what we're using if that's useful to anyone, rules say links in comments so I'll drop it below.
Source: r/AI_Agents · by /u/No-Plant-5234