GroundEval: A Deterministic Replacement for LLM-as-Judge in Stateful Agent Evaluation
arXiv:2606. 22737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Before letting an agent operate over real context, can you prove it used the right evidence?
CARGO is a framework for evaluating agentic AI systems in production that addresses the problem of reference-instance divergence (RID), where reference-based judges penalize correct answers that involve different entity identifiers. It treats retrieved references as procedural exemplars, grounds judgments in the live instance’s context, assigns a three-way status to claims, and gates evaluation by retrieval confidence. Using the CARGO-Bench diagnostic suite, CARGO eliminates false penalties and improves discrimination while revealing a limitation in detecting procedural corruptions.
arXiv:2606. 22737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Before letting an agent operate over real context, can you prove it used the right evidence?
arXiv:2609.16487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a framework for evaluating data-science agents on live, continuously updated data using executable ground truth and format-agnostic factoid...
The paper "trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories" examines the limitations of outcome-only evaluation for large language model agents. Using a deterministic tool‑using support‑desk environment with a scripted oracle policy and a fault injector, the authors compare five different judging approaches—programmatic rules, outcome‑only, step‑rubric at two model sizes, and a self‑consistency ensemble—on metrics such as detection, step localisation, fault typing, calibration, and cost across 400 trajectories. The study finds that outcome‑only judges miss many silent faults and generate false positives, while step‑rubric judges achieve higher recall with no false alarms but at greater cost, and that none of the judges read the final reply, allowing fabricated promises to evade detection. "whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current production‑default outcome‑only evaluations can overlook critical failures in agent behavior, underscoring the need for more nuanced, step‑level judging methods to ensure reliable LLM agent performance."
arXiv:2607. 17883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprises will not deploy AI agents they cannot trust, and the most-cited reason for distrust is hallucination: confident, fluent output that is simply not true.
The paper introduces Trustworthy RAG, an evaluation agent designed to detect misinformation and knowledge poisoning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. It combines natural language inference verification, a five-signal poison detector, and a weighted Trust Index to assess the reliability of retrieved content. Experiments on multiple LLMs show high accuracy and precision, with the agent effectively blocking unsafe advice in a secure-coding assistant scenario.
The paper introduces a framework for evaluating AI systems that not only checks final labels but also tracks the reasoning behind them through three core sources—grounds, norms, and authority—forming an eight-cell counterfactual judgment cube. It defines minimal source replacement sets, called judgment receipts, to explain changes in verdicts and provides certification cost bounds for black-box evaluators. The authors present ReasonBench, a benchmark with 19,520 cases, and demonstrate that while high standard accuracy can mask robustness issues, receipt accuracy reveals significant gaps in reasoning consistency across different models.
arXiv:2607. 02116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous AI agents increasingly depend on external knowledge stores, yet most retrieval pipelines provide relevance without durable guarantees of provenance, version identity, integrity, traceability, or point-in-time reconstruction.
VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that transforms a text prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any video frames are generated. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection, etc.) and records provenance‑carrying evidence for each action. The system maps these records to a three‑valued state—supported, contradicted, or unknown—providing traceable verdicts that can be used to refine generation models.
The paper reports a case study of a large language model (LLM) coding agent tasked with building a multi‑component data system from a detailed specification. During a single session the agent introduced five defects, which were categorized by violated constraints and detection methods. The study also evaluates the agent’s retrieval‑filtering strategy on the HotpotQA benchmark, showing that filtering to a graph‑identified entity set yields higher recall than unfiltered search, with a statistically significant gap across all tested budgets.
The paper introduces a risk‑controlled framework for using large language models (LLMs) as judges in tasks without reference answers. By calibrating uncertainty thresholds on a held‑out set, the method ensures that the false discovery rate of accepted verdicts stays below a user‑specified level α with high probability, using finite‑sample Clopper–Pearson intervals. When the parametric judge lacks confidence, the instance is routed to a retrieval‑augmented mode with a second calibrated threshold, preserving the error guarantee while achieving higher coverage than single‑mode baselines.
arXiv:2606. 04990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks by interacting with external tools, retrieval systems, memory modules, environments, and other agents.
The study investigates how prior scores influence large language model (LLM) judgments in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. By testing three prompt conditions—no metadata, revision framing, and anchored metadata containing prior scores—the authors find that prior scores systematically bias evaluations, shifting ratings toward those scores across 192,000 attempts. The bias also affects categorical decisions, blocking 48% of error corrections and flipping 10.18% of correct judgments, and is not mitigated by Chain-of-Thought or a warning, underscoring the need for careful context engineering.