arXiv AI

Credit Without Ground Truth: Claim-Matched Evaluation of Step-Level Credit with Finite Executed Replay

arXiv AI
Aug 21

Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay

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.

By Haiyue Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Better Deck or Different Judge? Evaluating Agentic Harness Gains in Corporate and Investment Banking

The paper evaluates an agentic harness that combines a 27B language model, financial calculations, narrative templates, and validation checks to produce corporate and investment banking presentation decks. Using a panel of five judges, the system consistently scores higher than a baseline model that generates directly from a short prompt, with scores ranging from 20.4 to 33.6 out of 95. However, judge variability and changes in grading criteria make it challenging to discern small improvements in deck quality.

By Ludovic Gibert, Matis Despujols, Andre-Louis Rochet
arXiv AI
Sep 25

When Does Action Credit Need Updating?

The paper investigates when historical action credit for tool‑using agents must be updated after policy changes. It introduces pairwise branch sensitivity to measure how policy updates affect action‑distinguishing branches, and proposes a first‑order anchored credit‑transport estimator along with a Decision‑Sufficient Credit Gate (DSC‑Gate) to decide whether to reuse, transport, or resample credit. Experiments show that DSC‑Gate reduces new tool steps by 39.4% with negligible impact on regret, demonstrating that many policy updates can avoid costly recomputation of action credit.

By Hongye Yang, Boxiao Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Same-Player Verification for Account Consistency in Counter-Strike 2

The paper introduces a method for verifying whether two gameplay replays in Counter‑Strike 2 belong to the same player by extracting a behavioral fingerprint that captures crosshair control, movement‑stop‑fire coordination, economy, combat engagement, and temporal rhythm. Using 1,330 demos and 13,300 observations, the authors train a pairwise model that achieves an ROC AUC of 0.931 and 0.722 recall at 95% precision, with low‑level mechanical habits providing the strongest identity signals. Aggregating multiple demos further improves performance, raising AUC to 0.986 when ten historical demos are considered.

By Xuchen Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Targeting Pivotal Decisions for Credit Assignment in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.36178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a promising approach for training large language model agents. However, its uniform assignment o...

By Dongwon Jung, Hemanth Neelgund Ramesh, Yifan Wang, Xiaomin Li, Yuexing Hao, Yu Hu, Muhao Chen, Varun Chandrasekaran, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, Jaron Lanier
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Unmatched Does Not Mean False: Incomplete Reference Sets Can Reverse Calibration Rankings in Open-Ended Theory-of-Mind Tracking

The paper demonstrates that open‑ended Theory‑of‑Mind trackers can produce valid beliefs that are absent from finite reference sets, and that treating unmatched outputs as false can reverse model‑selection rankings. By recoding references for 259 beliefs, the authors show a dramatic drop in weighted prevalence and a reversal of strictly proper Brier risk, with similar distortions observed in a 301‑question NQ‑open DPR‑BERT pipeline. The study further reveals that 90‑96% of audited unmatched beliefs are literally true, and introduces a TriSource‑Restore method that anchors reference labels to a probability‑sampled human pilot to restore calibration and ranking integrity.

By Zhexi Feng, Wuxi Chen, Bingrui Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

CITECHOICE: A Causal Audit of How Document Presentation Redistributes Citation Credit in Agentic Search

CITECHOICE is a causal audit that examines how the presentation of documents in an agentic search engine redistributes citation credit. Using 129 everyday‑query transcripts, the study compares structured versus prose renderings of the same source while keeping all other transcript elements fixed. The results show that structured rendering increases the target’s citation count by about half a citation per answer without adding total citations or diminishing competitors’ credit, while also revealing that rank position has a larger effect on citation rates than presentation order alone.

By Sriram Selvam, Anneswa Ghosh
arXiv AI
Oct 9

The Harness as the Only Mutable Surface: Compliance-Bounded Self-Evolution of LLM Agents in Credit Pipelines, with a Measured Admission Gate

The paper proposes that self‑evolving large‑language‑model agents can only be safely reviewed if their changes are confined to the runtime harness—instruction text, tool‑call logic, and primitive composition—while the model weights remain fixed. A dual‑loop engine with an admission gate records a hash‑chained diff before deployment, and simulation experiments show that this gate admits only safe changes, preventing error increases and maintaining false‑positive rates. When the gate is removed, many harmful changes slip through and missed flags rise, illustrating the gate’s protective role.

By Ravil Akhtyamov