GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.
By Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran, Kai Wei
arXiv:2607. 12790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists.
By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
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
arXiv:2606. 09843v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) give stable answers to personality questionnaires, yet these self-reports fail to predict how the models behave.
By Juan Manuel Contreras
Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists. In many real applications it does not.
arXiv:2607. 28685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent-safety benchmarks measure different behaviors, and their scores get quoted interchangeably as an agent's safety.
By Youting Wang, Xiao Han, Dingyan Shang, Yuan Tang, Bowen Liu
arXiv:2606.21008v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We present evidence that analogy is at the core of LLM intelligence. In our benchmark, LLMs compete in generating sets of analogous statement...
By David Nordfors
arXiv:2606. 21008v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The metanym game is a competitive word game for LLMs that measures structural intelligence against established cognitive-science constructs.
By David Nordfors
The paper investigates how much of an AI model’s expressed preferences are due to the model itself versus the instrument (prompt) used to elicit those preferences. By fixing the set of outcomes and models while varying five different prompting instruments across 15 welfare-related outcomes, the study finds that the ranking of outcomes is only moderately generalizable (coefficient 0.348) and that a single instrument’s preference provides little insight into another instrument’s results. The analysis shows that even after removing any single instrument, model, or a subset of outcomes, the overall preference estimate remains robust, yet the variability across instruments remains significant.
By Jason Hung
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:2609.21841v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Frontier language models now produce professional deliverables that expert graders judge to match human work on a substantial share of economically val...
By Abbas Raza Ali, Muhammad Ajmal Siddiqui, Moona Zahid
arXiv:2607. 18966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models trained with reinforcement learning may learn to optimize the grader's judgment rather than the intended objective.
By Axel H{\o}jmark, J\'er\'emy Scheurer, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Felix Hofst\"atter, Jason Wolfe, Theodore Ehrenborg, Bronson Schoen, Alexander Meinke