The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.
By Jiapeng Li
arXiv:2609.13543v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM agents are predominantly benchmarked on short, single-task trajectories, yet real deployments run for hours under contention, surfacing a different...
By Grace Chang Yuan, Xiaoman Zhang, Sung Eun Kim, Luyang Luo, Pranav Rajpurkar
The paper investigates how altering the harness—specifically the way a coding agent manages context and tool outputs—affects performance when the underlying model and task remain unchanged. Two harness configurations were compared on three coding benchmarks: a control that preserves the full conversation in order, and a treatment that mechanically shortens older tool results to keep the context tight. Across all benchmarks, the treatment increased the mean per‑task fail‑to‑pass fraction and, in some cases, the number of complete solutions, demonstrating that the harness itself can significantly influence a frozen model’s effectiveness.
By Sydney Lewis
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.
By Radhika Gaonkar
The paper introduces a benchmark of 400 synthetic healthcare workflow episodes to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents’ reliability in escalating care when evidence is missing or conflicting. It finds that while clean decision accuracy is high (0.97), models miss a large proportion of necessary escalations (32–97%) under uncertainty, and even the largest 9.7B model’s performance drops to 0.78 in conflict scenarios. A workflow-aware controller improves utility and reduces missed escalations, but its effectiveness is limited by lexical generalization failures.
By Zihao Zheng (Washington University in St. Louis), Junyi Yao (Washington University in St. Louis), Baichuan Li (Southern Methodist University), Jiayu Long (Washington University in St. Louis)
arXiv:2610.15714v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Healthcare agents must transform longitudinal clinical evidence into reliable actions through heterogeneous tools and stateful workflows, conditions un...
By Rui Tang, Hongqiu Wang
Async-RBench is a new benchmark that tests how large language model agents handle asynchronous task execution. It includes 200 executable tasks across eight scenarios, with a scenario controller that delivers results based on task-state conditions and an Event Response Contract that defines required changes, preservation, avoidance, and re-verification. The benchmark introduces the Dynamic Replanning Score (DRS) to evaluate both the response process and outcome, and finds that agents generally perform worse with asynchronous delivery compared to batched delivery, highlighting challenges in reliable asynchronous task handling.
By Detao Zeng, Guilin Ou, Nuo Chen, Yunhao Feng, Hongliang Wang, Qinli Yang, Junming Shao, Zhong Zhang
AgentJudgeBench is a new benchmark that evaluates the reliability of large language model (LLM) judges on agentic tool‑calling tasks involving workflow directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). It contains 3,808 instances across six DAG topologies and three difficulty tiers, tested with five generators (3B–70B open‑weight models and GPT‑5.4) and six judges (20B to frontier scale) under both paired‑with‑and‑without‑ground‑truth conditions. The study finds that judge alignment degrades with task difficulty, ground‑truth exposure can sometimes hurt alignment, and structured evaluation rubrics provide modest improvements, revealing a structural ceiling that model capacity alone cannot surpass.
By Abhigya Verma, Amit Kumar Saha, Seganrasan Subramanian, Sai Harshitha Aluru
arXiv:2610.41025v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: When a language-model agent fails a multi-step task, can another model find the decisive mistake and fix it with a single action? We introduce ReplayRC...
By Jeremy Canale, Fabien Soulis
arXiv:2608.22808v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: When can an agent failure be caught? An audit is usually limited by the record rather than by the method. CatchBench therefore puts one auditor's q...
By Yue Zhao
arXiv:2609.03221v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Counterfactual fairness audits of clinical language-model agents report a flip rate: how often an action changes when only the patient's demo...
By Rohith Reddy Bellibatlu, Manpreet Singh, Deepak Parashar, Rahul Joshi
arXiv:2608.23397v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Interactive clinical agents must gather decisive evidence and convert it into grounded actions under partial observability. A correct final diagnosis a...
By Ruoyu Wu, Shenfu Xie, Yinqian Sun, Haibo Tong, Feifei Zhao