The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata
arXiv:2606. 02965v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models gain tool access and are deployed as autonomous agents capable of editing records, executing transactions, and modifying infrastructure, we still evaluate them based on the sole metric of task completion.
By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
arXiv:2605.16679v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density,...
By Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi, Tao Xia, Joonyul Lee, Steve Brown, Kevin Riley, Frank Wang, T. Y. Alvin Liu, Hank Capps MD, Zeyu Tang, Xiangchen Song, Lingjing Kong, Fan Feng, Tianyi Zeng, Zhiwei Liu, Zixian Ma, Hang Jiang, Fangli Geng, Yuan Yuan, Chenyu You, Qingsong Wen, Hua Wei, Yanjie Fu, Yue Zhao, Carl Yang, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Sanmi Koyejo, Eric P. Xing, Philip S. Yu, Weiran Yao
DAYJOB is a new benchmark comprising 130 long‑horizon professional tasks created by experts in healthcare (50 tasks) and finance (80 tasks). Each task is packaged as a containerized Harbor environment and evaluated against a detailed binary rubric, requiring agents to meet every criterion to pass. In tests across 30 model configurations, the best model (Claude Opus 5.5) achieves about 24% success in both domains, while the median model scores below 3%.
By Stephanie Finley, Liudas Panavas, Thomas Mikkelson, Cam Hinton, Stacey Ganss, Bradley Monton, Emily Kendall, Michelle Spradlin, Lydia Bye, Michael O'Brien, Lauren Ylvisaker, Derek Ray, Suhaas Garre, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen
arXiv:2608. 19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent agent benchmarks increasingly ground evaluation in executable environments, from code repair to web navigation, app APIs, and function calling.
By Zhuochun Li, Youngmin Ko, Ali Keramati, Nicola Ferri, Susana Palmaz Lopez Pelaez, Liang-Chun Tsai, Calvin Wang, Mirco Milletari, Tuhin Kundu, Vadim Smolyakov, Kjartan Olafsson, Tommy Guy
arXiv:2608. 11727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a coding agent obeys a rule, it may simply have been going to do that anyway.
By Zining Huang, Haoran Que, Hong Zeng, Ge Zhang, Zuo Wang, Jin Chen, Haodong Wang, Zhongfei Hou, Changxin Pu, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang
arXiv:2609.21841v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Frontier language models now produce professional deliverables that expert graders judge to match human work on a substantial share of economically val...
By Abbas Raza Ali, Muhammad Ajmal Siddiqui, Moona Zahid
The paper introduces PACT, a benchmark designed to evaluate how well enterprise AI assistants follow compliance rules when faced with various pressures such as persistent users or hurried managers. PACT covers twelve regulated domains and forty-eight realistic multi‑turn scenarios, pairing each rule with a shortcut that violates it and applying different pressures across wording and system‑prompt modes. Using PACT, the authors profile six metrics of compliance and aggregate them into a PACTScore, revealing significant variability among 22 LLM models and that even top performers misapply rules 6–10% of the time, with user pressure increasing violations by 65% on average.
By Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol
arXiv:2606. 19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear.
By Jiajun Li, Mingshu Cai, Yixuan Li, Yu Ding, Ran Hou, Guanyu Nie, Xiongwei Han, Wanyuan Wang
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
By Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Guanghui Wang, Devin Zhang, Jae Oh Woo
arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.
By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
arXiv:2608.30322v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Professional agent tasks often depend on conventions that are absent from public corpora, yet benchmarks rarely control whether an agent has access to...
By Hanlin Tian, Minhao Li, Yu Mi, Sihan Zhu, Zhao Yang, Yuxiang Wang, Hongquan Zhu, Qiufei Hu