The paper introduces a penalty‑aware evaluation framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that uses asymmetric scoring, knowledge‑gap canaries, and a failure‑attribution pipeline. Applying this framework to three commercial RAG products and a baseline on SimpleQA‑Verified, the authors find that while overall accuracy is similar across systems, canary violation rates vary dramatically, showing that systems differ more in when they answer than in what they answer. The study demonstrates that penalty‑aware scoring can reorder system rankings and is robust across different penalty settings.
By Alden Do Rosario, Hussein Younes, Felipe Pires
The paper introduces State‑Conditioned Minimal Sufficient Evidence Recovery (SER), a method that, given a coding agent’s current state, reconstructs a compact set of evidence passages that collectively provide all facts needed for the agent’s next decision. Using the SERBench dataset of 500 held‑out states from 45 repositories, the authors show that their MSS‑Complement approach recovers a complete evidence set for 73.0 % of states with five items and 80.6 % with eight, outperforming baseline ranking methods. The study also demonstrates that this set‑level policy improves downstream performance on AMA‑Bench and highlights the importance of retrieving missing facts rather than merely re‑ranking similar passages.
By Zhexi Feng, Ruiyi Zhang, Yongbo Yang, Pengtao Xie
arXiv:2608. 15428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiple-choice benchmarks are graded on whether a model picks the right option, not on whether it needed the question.
By Volodymyr Ovcharov
arXiv:2608. 00585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verification for retrieval-augmented generation usually scores each retrieved chunk and drops the ones that fail.
By Randhir Kumar
Mnemon is a memory agent that stores conversations as raw, dated records and uses a fast System 1 decision model (Jev) to quickly judge the relevance of records, while a slow System 2 LLM plans searches and composes answers. The agent consolidates records into topic timelines and value histories in the background, enabling efficient retrieval without rewriting conversations into structured formats. Experiments show Mnemon achieving high scores on LoCoMo and LongMemEval‑S with low context length and cost, and Jev outperforming LLMs in evidence separation and speed.
By Guangren Wang
The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.
By Tatiana Petrova, Andrei Mazniak, Radu State
The paper reports on a deployed multi‑agent tender‑response system that uses an open‑weights language model under sovereignty constraints. In a blind comparison, the system’s answers were judged at least as good as human‑written bids in 40 of 55 sections, with only a few gaps attributable to missing knowledge rather than writing quality. The study also demonstrates an asymmetry in conditioning: while structural markup improves reading tasks, converting instruction material from prose to nested XML degrades answer quality, and naming forbidden constructions concentrates defects.
By Cheng Yu, Nikhil Mathew, Zhengjie Wang
arXiv:2608.25937v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) sometimes already have the potential to answer correctly, but still report a wrong answer. Explaining this outcome is dif...
By Jia-Hao Ji, Sijie Li, Jiabei Cheng, Zixi She, Jin-Tai Yu, Zhiyuan Yuan
arXiv:2605. 03534v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds answers in retrieved passages, yet relevance does not guarantee sufficiency: a topical passage may still fail to justify the answer.
By Jingxi Qiu, Zeyu Han, Cheng Huang
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
By Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang
arXiv:2608.21601v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Benchmarks for scientific artificial intelligence are mostly written to be scored: multiple-choice questions, curated agent tasks with reference soluti...
By Aubrey Brueckner, Darshil Patel, Yuhuan He, Timothy Kassis
The paper introduces matched trajectory replay, a protocol that fixes answer states, evidence points, budgets, and action costs to evaluate how confidence signals influence agent actions. Using this method, the authors compare raw verbalized confidence with post‑hoc isotonic calibration across six model‑dataset pairs, finding that calibration can significantly improve accuracy of committed answers but may reduce coverage and increase retrieval usage. The study concludes that calibration helps interpret commitment risk but does not predict the benefit of additional retrieval, indicating the need for separate value‑of‑information estimates.
By Prateek Chhikara