arXiv AI
Jul 8
Agent Step Value: Probing the Observer Effect in Black-Box Traces
arXiv:2607. 04419v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Final-answer scores hide which agent transitions helped or harmed a trace.
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.
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arXiv AI
Jul 14
Agent Step Value: Auditing Evaluator-Channel Reversals in Black-Box Agent Traces
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 AI
Sep 2
trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories
The paper "trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories" examines the limitations of outcome-only evaluation for large language model agents. Using a deterministic tool‑using support‑desk environment with a scripted oracle policy and a fault injector, the authors compare five different judging approaches—programmatic rules, outcome‑only, step‑rubric at two model sizes, and a self‑consistency ensemble—on metrics such as detection, step localisation, fault typing, calibration, and cost across 400 trajectories. The study finds that outcome‑only judges miss many silent faults and generate false positives, while step‑rubric judges achieve higher recall with no false alarms but at greater cost, and that none of the judges read the final reply, allowing fabricated promises to evade detection. "whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current production‑default outcome‑only evaluations can overlook critical failures in agent behavior, underscoring the need for more nuanced, step‑level judging methods to ensure reliable LLM agent performance."
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31
ClawTrack: Towards Trace-Level Evaluation and Improvement of Real-World Autonomous Agents
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.
arXiv AI
Jul 16
STOCKTAKE: Measuring the Gap Between Perception and Action in LLM Agents with a Fair Oracle
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.
arXiv AI
Jul 3
GroundEval: A Deterministic Replacement for LLM-as-Judge in Stateful Agent Evaluation
arXiv:2606. 22737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Before letting an agent operate over real context, can you prove it used the right evidence?
arXiv AI
Sep 11
OpenDiscoveryTrace: Process Traces for Evaluating AI Scientist Workflows
OpenDiscoveryTrace is a public dataset of 558 complete AI scientific agent trajectories that records the reasoning process—thoughts, tool calls, observations, errors, revision triggers, and confidence—across 124 scientific tasks in drug discovery, materials science, genomics, and literature analysis. The dataset includes seven models (three frontier models and four open‑weight models) and 60 live‑retrieval variants, providing a balanced view of performance and error patterns. Pilot analysis shows that process traces reveal behavioral differences invisible to output‑only evaluation, such as differing error rates and types among frontier models.
arXiv AI
Aug 12
Auditing Automated Evaluation, Error Propagation, and Runtime Mitigation in Tool-Using Language Agents
arXiv:2604. 16706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated evaluation of tool-using large language model (LLM) agents is widely assumed to be reliable, yet this assumption is rarely validated against human annotation.
arXiv AI
Jun 30
SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent with Process Reward for Fact Attribution
arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15
STOCKTAKE: Measuring the Gap Between Perception and Action in LLM Agents with a Fair Oracle
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 AI
Sep 15
Root-Cause Attribution Is a Search Problem: Continual Search for Long-Horizon Agent Failures
The paper introduces Continual Search, an iterative framework that guides large language models to persistently search for diagnostic evidence in long AI agent execution logs, addressing the limitations of one-shot judgments. Evaluated on four existing RCA benchmarks and a new large-scale dataset called MegaRCA-Mix, Continual Search consistently boosts attribution performance, achieving a 40% F1 improvement for GPT‑5.5 on MegaRCA‑Mix. The results show that effective search can outweigh raw model scale, enabling lower-tier models to outperform higher-tier ones in root‑cause attribution tasks.
arXiv AI
Jun 2
AgentProcessBench: Diagnosing Step-Level Process Quality in Tool-Using Agents
arXiv:2603. 14465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions.