Among chess opening positions that a strong engine judges essentially equal (Stockfish 18 evaluation within 10 centipawns of zero, depth-stable) and that humans actually reach on Lichess (October 2025; 1,661 positions, 16. 1M occurrences), human results are not balanced.
arXiv:2606. 15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down.
By Yitao Li
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) correctly gauge their confidence when acting in a hidden‑information chess variant. In experiments where the location of a hidden royal piece is repeatedly relocated, the models’ stated probabilities about the piece’s position were almost never accurate at high confidence levels, with a calibration deficit concentrated in those high‑confidence events. Across multiple model configurations and providers, the same pattern emerged, and conventional evaluation metrics such as legality, cost, latency, and completion rate were found to be uncorrelated with belief quality, yet a model could still win the game despite poor confidence estimates.
By Bhushan Kashinath Joshi
Agentic systems increasingly gate actions on a model's own stated confidence, which assumes confidence tracks correctness at the moment of acting. We test this in a hidden-information chess variant wh...
The study analyzes 373,019 judgments from LLM‑scored benchmarks, decomposing variance into system, item, judge, and interaction components via generalizability theory. It finds that with a single judge, generalizability converges to a ceiling determined by the system‑by‑judge variance, which is substantially lower in pairwise preference settings, allowing one judge to suffice. The research also reveals significant biases in presentation order and highlights that many published win‑rate claims fall below the measured floor of the benchmarks.
By Atul Anand
The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.
By Jiapeng Li
arXiv:2607. 10202v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-model comparisons read divergence in value dispositions as evidence that language models hold individuated values.
By Hong-In Won, Jinseok Jang, Hyoseop Kim
The paper investigates how inherited state affects sub-agent performance in multi-agent frameworks, comparing three inheritance policies—Reset, Selective, and Full—across a ladder of Qwen3 models. It finds that reliance on stale state decreases with model capability, but a mid-capability model (Qwen3‑1.7B) exhibits a statistically significant local minimum of net harm, defining a "danger band." Selective handoff consistently improves accuracy over Full, especially within the danger band, while a fixed-threshold router fails on other datasets.
By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv:2609.25052v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: "An agent that writes its conclusions into a store it later retrieves from closes a loop usually reported as one-way contamination. Taking the loop to...
By Wenhui Chen, Jianlin Chen, Ziyao Lin, Chi Man Vong
The paper investigates how many human annotators are equivalent to a panel of 32 large‑language‑model (LLM) judges. By comparing the panel’s label distributions to empirical human labels on three ChaosNLI tasks, the authors find two distinct effective panel sizes: distribution‑error matching yields effective sizes of 2.304, 3.750, and 3.445, while spectral matching gives 4.242, 6.459, and 6.499, indicating a 1.72–1.89× gap. The study also explores how spectral diversity, participation ratio, and panel composition affect effective size, and demonstrates that carefully chosen panels can outperform baseline accuracy while improving effective size.
By Chao Li, Yingying Yu, Yunfeng Li
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
By Darragh Quinn, David Dylan, Roisin Healy, Fionn Carroll, Maeve Donnelly, Cormac Sheehan
arXiv:2608. 09128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent social settings where they must cooperate, negotiate, and adapt to other agents.
By Keyu He, Xuhui Zhou, Maarten Sap