arXiv Machine Learning

When Can You Trust Offline Evaluation of Equal-Cost Top-k Allocation? A Controlled, Reproducible Benchmark and Practitioner's Guide

arXiv:2608. 12489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizations decide whom to treat under a budget and want to know what a targeting rule would have earned before deploying it.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Counterfactual Tool Ranking under Utility, Cost, and Privilege Constraints

The paper introduces a counterfactual tool ranking framework that accounts for authority, historical support, and estimation nuances. Using eleven enterprise-inspired tools, synthetic and real-world experiments on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, the study compares direct regression and doubly robust (DR) methods, finding that DR performs better in shifted environments while direct regression excels in linear settings. The authors also evaluate Qwen2.5 models on held-out tasks, analyze policy differences under missing support, and present a falsifiable evaluation method with publicly available evidence.

By Jiapeng Li
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Ask Which, Not How Good: Sizing Benchmarks Scored by an LLM

The study analyzes 373,019 judgments from LLM‑scored benchmarks, decomposing variance into system, item, judge, and interaction components via generalizability theory. It finds that with a single judge, generalizability converges to a ceiling determined by the system‑by‑judge variance, which is substantially lower in pairwise preference settings, allowing one judge to suffice. The research also reveals significant biases in presentation order and highlights that many published win‑rate claims fall below the measured floor of the benchmarks.

By Atul Anand
arXiv AI
2d ago

The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State

The paper investigates how inherited state affects sub-agent performance in multi-agent frameworks, comparing three inheritance policies—Reset, Selective, and Full—across a ladder of Qwen3 models. It finds that reliance on stale state decreases with model capability, but a mid-capability model (Qwen3‑1.7B) exhibits a statistically significant local minimum of net harm, defining a "danger band." Selective handoff consistently improves accuracy over Full, especially within the danger band, while a fixed-threshold router fails on other datasets.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Tail-Influence Sampling for CVaR Policy Evaluation

arXiv:2609.38096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Policies with similar mean returns can differ sharply in rare failures, yet estimating lower-tail conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) accurately can requi...

By Pauline Bourigault, Xiaotong Ji, Matthieu Zimmer, Rasul Tutunov, Haitham Bou-Ammar