arXiv AI

False Floors: LLM Safety Routing Evaluations Break Under Distribution Shift

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 21

Stopping and Routing LLM Judge Panels

arXiv:2608. 19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM evaluation pipelines often have many candidate judges: general LLM-as-a-judge prompts, reward models, safety classifiers, confidence variants, and task-specific verifiers.

By Bin Zhu, Yi Xie, Yanghui Rao
arXiv AI
1d ago

The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State

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 AI
Sep 4

CASCADE: A Component Ablation and Corpus Audit of a Layered Local Defense for MCP-Based Systems

The paper evaluates CASCADE, a fully local layered defense for Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based systems, by conducting a component ablation and corpus audit on a fixed 5,000-sample dataset. It demonstrates that the choice of aggregation convention heavily influences reported metrics, that detection performance varies with provenance, and that the released configuration does not fully disclose the operating point. The study also shows that a local review model invoked for a third of requests does not alter classification outcomes, highlighting the importance of reproducibility and transparency in defense evaluations.

By \.Ipek Abas{\i}kele\c{s} Turgut, Edip G\"um\"u\c{s}
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Invocation-Level Reliability of Tool-Using Agents

The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.

By Afiya Noorain, Subhranshu Mohanty, Amritesh Banerjee, Abhijit Dasgupta