arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Accuracy: Disentangling Decomposition from Typed-State Quality Assurance in Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines

The paper investigates whether performance gains in multi‑agent large language model (LLM) pipelines come from typed contracts between agents or from specialized prompts that enable decomposition. Using a requirements‑engineering task, the authors compare three architectures— a single‑call baseline, a two‑call variant that reuses specialized prompts but passes an unvalidated intermediate, and a pipeline with a Pydantic‑validated typed state—across 18 conditions involving 625 requirements, three small language models, and two languages. Results show that the two‑call, specialized‑prompt variant yields the largest F1 improvement (+0.075), while the typed state offers only a marginal difference (+0.013) and introduces out‑of‑range outputs at agent boundaries, with a small but reproducible increase in inter‑model MoSCoW consistency. whyItMatters":"The study clarifies that specialized prompts and call structure contribute more to accuracy than typed state validation, informing design choices for reliable multi‑agent LLM pipelines."

arXiv AI
Sep 2

SAGE: State-Grounded, Abstention-Aware Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents

SAGE (State‑Grounded, Abstention‑Aware Evaluation) is a new framework for assessing task‑oriented dialogue agents that focuses on whether each turn correctly advances the workflow state rather than just the quality of the reply. It compiles workflow specifications and per‑turn state differences into schema‑grounded criteria, then evaluates them through a cascade of symbolic rules and encoder/NLI verifiers that abstain instead of guessing, producing a turn‑level decision with an evidence trace. In experiments across MultiWOZ, Schema‑Guided Dialogue, and ABCD datasets, SAGE‑Core—using only symbolic rules and on‑device encoders—outperforms all evaluated LLM‑based judges, including GPT‑4.1 variants, while incurring zero paid LLM cost.

By Rayan Khoury, Shih-Yao Lin, Pratyush Mishra
arXiv AI
Oct 19

Eliciting Specifications: When Does Interactive Clarification Help?

The paper investigates whether an elicitation agent (EA) can improve the quality of Lean specifications generated by large language models (LLMs) through interactive clarification. The EA decomposes a task, identifies unresolved decisions, asks a limited number of clarification questions, and refines the natural‑language specification before an LLM formalizer translates it into Lean. Experiments on 189 Verina Lean 4 tasks show that cross‑model pipelines (e.g., Sonnet 4.6 → GPT‑5.6) can achieve up to a 65.6 % strict pass@1 rate, whereas same‑model pipelines do not consistently improve accuracy.

By Mowafak Allaham, Aditya Vempaty, Ashish Jagmohan, Prasenjit Dey, Ravi Kokku
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Who Holds the Pen? Let Specifications, Not Agents, Sign Off

The paper argues that large language model agents should not be the sole authority on whether they have satisfied a task. It identifies two gaps—understanding–execution and state–authority—where agents may claim completion without actually meeting the specification. The authors propose SpecHarness, a framework that separates agent proposals from authoritative state by requiring evidence from qualified providers to confirm compliance, and demonstrate its effectiveness on guideline‑following and artifact‑generation tasks.

By Haiqing Li, Xin Ma, Yinhao Wu, Wenliang Zhong, Feng Jiang, Thao M. Dang, Xiao Hu, Hehuan Ma, Yuzhi Guo, Junzhou Huang
arXiv AI
2d ago

Verified but Vacuous: Three Failure Surfaces of LLM-Driven Verified Code Generation

The paper argues that the term "verified" in LLM‑generated code is ambiguous, identifying three distinct failure surfaces: verifier acceptance (Surface A), syntactic specification binding (Surface B), and semantic specification fidelity (Surface C). Empirical tests on Python and Rust benchmarks show that high verifier acceptance does not guarantee binding to a specification, and even fully‑verified Rust outputs can fail hidden tests, revealing gaps between formal proofs and real‑world correctness.

By Aditya Vempaty, Himaneesh Sompalle, Manan Tayal, Mowafak Allaham, Prasenjit Dey, Ashish Jagmohan, Ravi Kokku
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

ANCHOR: Assessing Naturalistic Constraint Hierarchies and Ordering in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding

arXiv:2610.16859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For repository-grounded coding agents, a functionally correct patch is not necessarily an acceptable one: developers also constrain how the task mu...

By Wenqiang Zhu, Xinping Lei, Zhiyi Lai, Zhengshuo Gong, Tianzhuang He, Songwei Yu, Weihao Li, Jingxuan Xu, Zihang Xu, Gang Wu, Zhongqiu Wang, Yuhui Bai, Jie Li, Zhao Liu, Junhao Fan, Yan Wu, Yanan Wu, Jiaheng Liu, Quan Gu, Ariel Deng
arXiv AI
Sep 12

SemVerBench: Benchmarking LLM Comprehension of Version-Constraint Resolution Semantics

SemVerBench is a benchmark that evaluates how well large language models (LLMs) understand and apply version-constraint resolution semantics, such as determining whether a version satisfies constraints like ^1.2.3 or >=2.0. The study finds that many models struggle with certain corner cases, with GPT‑5.1 performing poorly while Claude and Opus perform much better. The authors suggest that the failures stem from an activation/application gap rather than a lack of knowledge, and recommend that coding agents delegate version resolution to a dedicated resolver tool.

By Qibai Chen, Zeming Liu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 7

RuBench: A Repository-Level Agentic Coding Benchmark with Natively Authored Russian Task Specifications

Developers increasingly delegate real maintenance work to product-grade coding agents, and many state tasks in their native language, in the style of a customer request rather than a curated English issue. Existing repository-level agentic benchmarks do not measure this setting: their task statements are English by design.