arXiv AI

Logarithmic Scores, Power-Law Discoveries: Disentangling Measurement from Coverage in Agent-Based Evaluation

arXiv AI
Aug 26

AgentWorld: Personality-Aware Reliability Evaluation for Agentic Information Retrieval

AgentWorld is a simulation framework that evaluates agentic information retrieval by incorporating diverse user personalities based on the Big Five (OCEAN) traits, stateful tool-use environments, and a pass$^k$ consistency metric with structured fault classification and partial-credit scoring. It includes a risk analyzer that uses Monte‑Carlo rollouts and advanced scoring methods to quantify trajectory brittleness and attack attribution. Experiments with conversational analytics, customer‑support agents, and adversarial stress‑testing demonstrate that personality variation reveals failure modes hidden by uniform testing, such as cross‑domain leakage, contextual drift, and significant quality gaps across personas.

By Gunja Agarwal, Arup Kumar Das, Arun Menon, Jitesh Chandra Mishra, Vignesh Divakaran
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

On the Behavioral Traits of LLM Agents

The paper introduces A-B-D, a method that infers personality traits of large language model agents from their behavioral data, combining functional actions and linguistic outputs across 345,667 real-world trajectories of 80 models. After filtering for stability and discriminability, 79 features are reduced to six reliable factors—two functional and four linguistic—revealing differences such as Claude‑Sonnet‑4.6’s planfulness versus GPT‑5.5’s low energy. The study also demonstrates a weak correlation between these inferred traits and agents’ self-reported Big Five scores, highlighting a knowledge‑action gap.

By Haokai Zhao, Jie Gao, Yunze Xiao, Xintao Wang, Weihao Xuan, Aditya Joshi, Mark Dredze, Jen-tse Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

SANE: Automated Scorer-Specific Metamorphic Testing for LLM Judges

SANE is an agent‑based framework that automatically generates scorer‑specific perturbation recipes and expected score relations for large‑language‑model judges, using behavioral requirements encoded as reusable agent instructions. It validates each recipe against the scorer’s intent and the instantiated test case, producing a growing inventory of aligned recipes as more scorers are added. In experiments across five domains, SANE yields 3.7× more validated test families than the Judge Reliability Harness, detects deficiencies in all domains—including professionalism and toxicity—and achieves strong human alignment in judge ranking on faithfulness (Spearman ρ = 0.852).

By Ethan Ludwick, Yu-Chung Hsiao
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Benchmarking LLM Judges for Voice-Agent Evaluation: Reliability, Calibration, and Human Oversight

The paper evaluates the use of large language models (LLMs) as judges for assessing conversational voice agents, comparing human judgments with GPT‑4.1 and GPT‑5 across telecom and retail interactions. It examines agreement, metric‑level correlations, and consistency across three evaluation configurations (p0, p1, p2) to determine how reliably LLMs can judge conversational quality and safety. The study finds that LLM‑based evaluation can be effective but its reliability varies by metric and configuration, suggesting a hybrid approach where LLMs handle scalable assessment while humans focus on metrics requiring contextual interpretation.

By Anupam Purwar, Shashank Singh, Kritika Srivastava
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

GAUGE: When Not to Trust LLM-as-a-Judge in User-Simulated Evaluation of Task-Oriented Agents

GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran, Kai Wei
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Efficient Test-Time Adaptation through Human-AI Interaction

The paper introduces Test-Time Adaptation through Human‑Agent Interaction (TAHI), a method that uses iterative human feedback to adapt AI agents to individual users’ criteria. By integrating cross‑session interaction data into agent context and weights, and building an evolving rubric module, the authors demonstrate that agents can improve task success by 4.5–20.9% after only a few interactions. The evolving rubric also serves as a scalable annotation tool, detecting 16.0–22.3% more failures than language models or humans alone, and personalized agents can even generalize improvements up to 8.8% across users.

By Zora Zhiruo Wang, Apurva Gandhi, Rulin Shao, Aspen Chen, Jonas Mueller, Zhiqi Liang, Jett Chen, Michael Ryan, Qianou Ma, Luxi He, Zhoujun Cheng, Andre He, Seungone Kim, Jiayi Geng, Mingqian Zheng, Weiwei Sun, Zheyuan Zhang, Xinran Zhao, Yike Wang, Abe Hou, Liwei Jiang, Pang Wei Koh, Diyi Yang, Graham Neubig, Daniel Fried
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Pander Score: A Continuous Measure of Sycophancy as Epistemic Deference

The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.

By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt