The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv:2606. 11686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Sawyer Zhang, Alexander Wang, Sophie Lei
The study investigates how different message formats affect the fidelity of information as it passes through multiple LLM agent relays. Using a controlled testbed, the authors encode twelve atomic facts in five formats (free natural language, precision‑instructed NL, JSON, triples, key‑value) across six hops and evaluate recall against programmatic ground truth. Results show that strong relays maintain near‑lossless recall for all formats, while weaker relays exhibit significant format‑dependent recall loss, and that any injected error is faithfully propagated across all formats without causing collateral damage.
By Sicheng Zeng
arXiv:2607. 18305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some limits on what language models know are not gaps in data coverage but structural properties of learning from text.
By Priyansh Srivastava, Romit Chatterjee
arXiv:2608. 12652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark contamination is diagnosed today with n-gram overlap, with likelihood-based membership inference, or with canary strings, and each needs something usually unavailable: the training corpus, a well-chosen test statistic, or foresight at dataset release.
By Florian Braun
arXiv:2602. 08686v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prefill-only KV compression freezes a token subset at the end of prefill and decodes from it without further eviction.
By Ning Yang, Chengzhi Wang, Yibo Liu, Baoliang Tian, Haijun Zhang
arXiv:2607. 20436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluations often assume that behavior observed during testing reflects behavior in ordinary use, but fine-tuning can break this assumption.
By Phongsakon Mark Konrad, Toygar Tanyel, Serkan Ayvaz
arXiv:2608. 16391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models become increasingly widespread, third-party providers that deploy open-weight models have become an important part of the ecosystem.
By Xiangfan Wu, Zonghao Ying, Huiyu Wu, Xing Zheng, Huangsheng Cheng, Xiaorong Shi, Jing Guo
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.
By Bhaskar Gurram
The paper audits a developer‑accessible on‑device language model, revealing that it can confidently produce incorrect answers while refusing benign prompts, a phenomenon termed task‑asymmetric miscalibration. The model’s confident outputs are surface‑indistinguishable, with classifiers based on user‑visible features failing to separate correct from wrong responses. The authors propose a model‑agnostic audit protocol, a surface‑indistinguishability test, and a black‑box consistency wrapper that improves reliability without requiring model access.
By Shashwat Pandey, Satwik Pandey, Suresh Raghu
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:2607. 09678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When LLM agents hand off information to one another, does the message format matter?
By Zayx Shawn