arXiv:2608. 15286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce AgentRelBench, an environment-agnostic reliability instrument that computes ground-truth, severity-priced damage from database state diffs across repeated runs, with no LLM in the measurement path, demonstrated on EnterpriseOps-Gym.
arXiv:2607. 17044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step enterprise agent tasks fail in a characteristic way: single-pass inference has no checkpoint between deciding an answer and committing to it.
arXiv:2608. 02464v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents fail mid-episode -- they loop, cascade tool errors, drift off goal, fabricate results, or silently absorb corrupted content -- and the standard remedy, judging every step with a second LLM, costs more than the agent itself.
arXiv:2608. 13063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work on LLM behavior under anomalous conditions asks whether a model notices anomalies.
arXiv:2608. 20290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses.
arXiv:2608. 19760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audited against causal ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals used to train LLM agents -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- identifies which steps causally matter better than chance.
Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses. Tracking these transitions means differencing two noisy estimates, leaving them vulnerable to measurement artifacts.
The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.
arXiv:2606. 10241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history.
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
The paper reports a failure study of a production agentic software‑delivery platform, analyzing 147 incidents across 81 runs. It shows that the standard reliability primitives—retry, timeout, and error‑rate circuit breaking—fail in practice, leading to costly loops, false trips, and blocked work. The authors identify two cross‑cutting causes—identity adequacy and evidence adequacy—and propose seven new reliability primitives that enforce reliability at the delegation level.
The paper investigates the reliability of language‑model judges used as measurement instruments on shared endpoints. Through two preregistered audits of 52,988 requests, the authors found that repeat rankings and byte‑identical replays fell far short of required thresholds, revealing significant instability. They identify three mechanisms—label‑to‑meaning bias, candidate gaps below the noise floor, and input permutation noise—that explain the gap, and propose a snapshot‑identity ladder, design rules, and a reporting checklist to mitigate such failures.
The paper reports a preregistered audit of language‑model judges used as measurement instruments, revealing that the assumption that a model’s responses remain stable over time is invalid. Across nearly 53,000 audited requests, repeat rankings and byte‑identical replays fell far below required reliability thresholds, with three identified mechanisms—label‑to‑meaning bias, candidate gaps below the noise floor, and input permutation noise—explaining the discrepancy. The study proposes a three‑level snapshot‑identity framework, eight design rules, and a reporting checklist to prevent such reliability failures in future evaluations.