Agent Step Value: State-Transition Measurement with State-Grounded LLM Evaluators
arXiv:2607. 04419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most agent evaluations collapse a multi-step trace into a final answer, a success flag, or a trajectory-level score.
arXiv:2607. 04419v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Final-answer scores hide which agent transitions helped or harmed a trace.
arXiv:2607. 04419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most agent evaluations collapse a multi-step trace into a final answer, a success flag, or a trajectory-level score.
arXiv:2607. 04419v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When evaluator-derived step rewards are pooled or compared across scoring channels, their sign is treated as transportable.
arXiv:2606. 10794v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Existing black-box LLM provenance methods achieve comparability by querying every candidate model with the same diagnostic prompts.
arXiv:2607. 13618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed.
LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed. On such tasks the final cost cannot say why an agent failed: it may have misread the world, or read it correctly and still failed to act (the knowing-doing gap).
arXiv:2606. 31371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language model (LLM) agents adapt their behavior through evaluator feedback, systematic evaluator biases propagate into the agent's learned strategy distribution - a phenomenon termed evaluator preference coupling.
arXiv:2609.27606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce State-Grounded Conditioning (SGC), a design principle for user-facing LLM agents that must condition on live user state (game state, sessi...
arXiv:2605. 09692v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous language agents increasingly expose traces, memories, plans and constraints, but existing evaluations rarely test whether these state variables are bound to final actions.
The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.
arXiv:2608. 04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated.
arXiv:2606. 30850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically deployed in multi-turn conversations, where each turn provides new evidence that should reduce epistemic uncertainty about their environment.
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.