arXiv AI

ProbeID: Verifying MCP Tool Identity for LLM Agents under Registry Drift

arXiv AI
Sep 12

What a Random Draw from the MCP Registry Contains, and What Tool-Use Benchmarks Contain Instead

The study examines the composition of a random sample from the Model Context Protocol (MCP) registry, revealing that only 48.8% of the 400 sampled npm/stdio servers successfully complete an initialization handshake, compared to 66.7% for a hand‑curated frame. Among the servers that run, there are no fatal JSON Schema violations across 2,766 advertised tools, but optional safety annotations vary widely, with a 58.8% omission rate in the random draw versus 41.5% in the curated set. The authors also compare MCP tool descriptions to two benchmark corpora, finding minimal near‑duplication in real MCP tools (2.8%) and significant repetition in synthetic datasets (up to 85.6%).

By Haseeb Mohammed Afsar
arXiv AI
Sep 17

AutoTuneBench: Trustworthy Measurement for Agent Auto-Tuning of LLM Serving Engines

AutoTuneBench introduces a trustworthy measurement protocol for evaluating how large language model agents auto‑tune GPU kernels and serving engines. The benchmark addresses four failure modes—strawman baselines, machine‑dependent timing, saturated tasks, and infrastructure defects—by enforcing code‑frozen protocols, database validation, anti‑cheat checks, pre‑registered comparisons, and external result anchoring. Using this protocol, the authors demonstrate that previously reported speedups are inflated, revealing more modest improvements across different engines and machines.

By Li Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

What Standard Evaluations Hide About Detectors of Hijacked LLM Agents: Rare Attacks, Unseen Tools and Benchmark Transfer

The paper investigates how standard evaluations of detectors for hijacked large language model (LLM) agents may conceal important weaknesses. By auditing eleven evaluations on the AgentDrift and AgentDojo benchmarks, the authors show that detectors often perform poorly when faced with rare attacks, unseen tools, or data from a different benchmark, with precision dropping dramatically at low attack rates and rankings reversing as tool coverage falls. They also find that a released LLM action monitor, despite high AUROC on its own data, would still generate many false alerts when applied to a new benchmark. "whyItMatters":"The study highlights that current evaluation practices can give a misleading sense of detector reliability, underscoring the need for more robust, cross‑benchmark testing to ensure real‑world safety of LLM agents."

By Mahmoud Abbasi, Juan M. N\'u\~nez V., Amin Shahraki
arXiv AI
Oct 23

VerifierBench: Benchmarking the Generation of Executable Verifiers for LLM Agents

The paper introduces VerifierBench, a benchmark comprising 222 tasks from six agent benchmarks and 4,993 hidden test cases designed to evaluate the generation of executable verifiers by large language model agents. It presents Verifier4Verifier (V4V), a six-check audit that screens source verifiers and test suites, and reports that across 19 models, normalized balanced accuracy ranges from 10.6 to 62.1, with generated verifiers more reliably rejecting invalid solutions than accepting valid ones. Case studies highlight that many false rejections stem from verifiers that accept no tested solution, revealing unsupported assumptions about solution formats, tool use, and code changes that exclude valid solutions, and underscore the need to test both acceptance of correct solutions and other permissible solutions.

By Jianing Yin, Ziyi Chen, Hao Wang, Yiyou Sun, Zijian Jin, Dawn Song, Daoan Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Hard-Gate Candidacy in a Deployed Validator Suite

The paper evaluates hard‑gate candidacy for validators in a deployed generative‑agent system by measuring how well each validator’s firing separates successful from failed builds. Across 13 validators and thousands of builds, only a few checks show statistically significant separation, while many fail to distinguish or never fire. The study highlights that skipped checks are recorded as passes, limiting detectable failure rates and underscoring the need for clearer evaluation records.

By Xin Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Frozen Judges, Moving Agents: Version-Dependent LLM-Judge Error and the Limits of Judge-Assisted Agent Evaluation

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