The paper introduces a Trust Layer for Agent Evaluation, a post‑hoc framework that appends a belief flag to each benchmark score. It checks four properties: alignment with the benchmark’s grading logic, traceable computation of a passing answer, consistency between the agent’s claim and actual behavior, and stability across repeated runs. Applied to five agent configurations on 108 tasks, the study finds that only 22.6% of recorded passes satisfy all checks, revealing widespread issues such as untraceable computation, false completion claims, and unstable results.
arXiv:2609.15319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier models score well on shallow document/chart reading tasks. In a controlled data-room audit, moving evidence into buried conditions reduced a...
The paper introduces TRACE, a protocol designed to diagnose whether changes in verifier scores for large language model agents reflect actual changes in agent behavior or merely alterations in the evaluation process. TRACE works by applying targeted changes to evaluation components, running paired experiments, and re‑scoring unchanged trajectories to isolate the source of score variation. Experiments on synthetic tasks and public benchmark tasks demonstrate that seemingly significant score shifts can often be attributed to evaluation artifacts, while TRACE can also detect genuine behavioral changes.
PartHackBench is a new methodology for evaluating partial-credit tool agents that eliminates confounding factors by using a private certifier to ensure that compared trajectories match in both current-state predicate satisfaction and standardized agent attribution. The approach measures score inflation only after certification, and in experiments on 18 held-out tasks it produced matched adversaries for 15 tasks, revealing mean inflation of 0.252 and detecting no strict rollbacks. The study shows that semantic LLM judges are vulnerable to evaluator-targeted attacks, whereas PB-CSTE current-state controls guarantee zero inflation by construction.
AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.
The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.
arXiv:2610.02588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents are increasingly given open-ended research tasks: discovering an empirical law from self-designed experiments, improving a heuristic whose optim...
arXiv:2609.37315v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using agents are entering settings where a wrong action carries real cost, and the benchmarks certifying them grade what each simulated tool cal...
The paper investigates when a language‑model judge can truly ground its verdicts in code correctness. It shows that current multi‑agent verification methods rely on evidence that is both independent of the answer and distinct between candidates—conditions that fail in code judging. By analyzing two label‑free measurements from the judge’s logs, the authors demonstrate that gating on one measurement allows the system to decline uncertain comparisons, improving accuracy from 20.7% to 36.9% while still answering half of all cases.
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. 28037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM-based agents are deployed in complex, multi-step workflows, a critical evaluation gap has emerged: most existing benchmarks judge only final outcomes, unable to distinguish reliable reasoning from lucky success or attribute failures to specific process deficiencies, hindering attribution in long-horizon tasks.
The paper proposes a claim‑specific verification audit for modular agents that replaces aggregate task scores with evidence‑based evaluations. Each agent conclusion is recorded with supporting evidence and classified as supported, unsupported, unresolved, or not evaluated, along with the boundary of validity. The audit employs three tools—oracle policies, perfect component replacements, and verifier‑score tests—to trace value changes, locate lost value, and assess verifier effectiveness, demonstrated on a portfolio‑allocation agent in a synthetic market.
arXiv:2608. 14940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current agent evaluations score models on the state visible at the end of a stopped run which they count as one trial.