The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv:2607. 26313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic systems act, so a defect in the evidence they retrieve becomes a wrong action with a currency cost.
By Gaston Besanson
arXiv:2609.37315v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-using agents are entering settings where a wrong action carries real cost, and the benchmarks certifying them grade what each simulated tool cal...
By Rohith Reddy Bellibatlu, Zichong Wang, Wenbin Zhang
arXiv:2609.16302v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: When a coding agent returns to existing software, it inherits evidence from earlier engineering work: tests, type checks, proofs, static analyses, an...
By Anjan Goswami
arXiv:2606. 08919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents begin to take real, irreversible actions (shell commands, file edits, deploys), the standard safety pattern is a human-in-the-loop approval gate: risky actions pause and wait for a person.
By Emre Turan
arXiv:2608. 16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing agent benchmarks ask whether the agent finished the task.
By Bowen Li, Guojun Wang
arXiv:2608. 11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The dominant paradigm treats AI safety as a property to be instilled during model training via RLHF, DPO, or Constitutional AI.
By Albus W. Ng, Yi Han, Jusheng Zhang, Wenhao Wang
VeriHarness is a method that enhances verification for large language model agents tackling long‑horizon tasks without needing reference answers at test time. It transforms the base LLM into an agentic verifier by providing a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills, using disagreement resolution and consensus challenge to evaluate competing claims. Across five benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness outperforms baselines, achieving significant performance gains and demonstrating self‑improvement of verification skills from failure feedback.
By Caiqi Zhang, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Zoey CuiZhu, Nigel Collier, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
The paper argues that using a large language model (LLM) as the sole judge in self‑improving agent pipelines is problematic, as the judge can be biased or manipulated, leading to false confidence in system performance. The authors propose a new framework, PROCTOR, which replaces the oracle judge with a deterministic, teacher‑student loop that enforces guardrails such as sandboxing, role separation, and acceptance checks to prevent cheating and ensure reliable evaluation. Experiments across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality demonstrate that PROCTOR mitigates eleven identified failure modes that previously allowed agents to achieve perfect scores while hiding significant capability gaps.
By Vansh Wahi
AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.
By Shrey Nag, Sachita, Abhishek Kumar Singh, Lipi Goel, Rajeshwar Singh Janwar
arXiv:2609.25686v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-horizon assigned work requires an LLM agent to track the state of a task: which steps are done, blocked, cancelled, or open to repetition. Agent...
By Chenyu Zhang, Wonbin Kweon, Jiawei Han
The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.
By Salman Rahman, Yubin Kim, Mihir Parmar, A. Ali Heydari, Genglin Liu, Simon A. Lee, Weizhi Zhang, Arian Hosseini, Ahmed A. Metwally, Yuzhe Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Xin Liu, Pavel Izmailov, Saadia Gabriel, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Hamid Palangi