UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.
By Pengyu Zhu, Lijun Li, Yaxing Lyu, Qianxin Luo, Jingyi Yang, Yi Liu, Tingfeng Hui, Xinyu Yuan, Li Sun, Sen Su, Jing Shao
arXiv:2605. 11030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Closed-loop tool-using agents are increasingly evaluated in executable web, code, and micro-task environments, but benchmark reports often conflate workloads, action-generating drivers, and the evidence admitted for systems-facing claims.
By Zhiqing Zhong, Zhijing Ye, Jiamin Wang, Xiaodong Yu
The paper "trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories" examines the limitations of outcome-only evaluation for large language model agents. Using a deterministic tool‑using support‑desk environment with a scripted oracle policy and a fault injector, the authors compare five different judging approaches—programmatic rules, outcome‑only, step‑rubric at two model sizes, and a self‑consistency ensemble—on metrics such as detection, step localisation, fault typing, calibration, and cost across 400 trajectories. The study finds that outcome‑only judges miss many silent faults and generate false positives, while step‑rubric judges achieve higher recall with no false alarms but at greater cost, and that none of the judges read the final reply, allowing fabricated promises to evade detection.
"whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current production‑default outcome‑only evaluations can overlook critical failures in agent behavior, underscoring the need for more nuanced, step‑level judging methods to ensure reliable LLM agent performance."
By Hadi Mohammadi
arXiv:2606. 10241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous improvement loops are hard to trust because the improvement process is usually external scaffolding bolted onto the agent: failures go unlogged, diagnoses cannot be replayed, and promote-or-discard decisions land in a side database rather than the agent's own history.
By Yohei Nakajima
arXiv:2608. 15089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon agents can fail even when their underlying models can solve the constituent steps.
By Ziheng Qin, Yaxin Lu, Zhangyang Atlas Wang, Kai Wang
arXiv:2608.22510v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent benchmarks often evaluate only final answers even when agents run on stateful runtimes. We argue this under-specifies what is being evaluated: th...
By YuanHang Xiao
Answer accuracy is an insufficient reliability signal for LLM data agents. In structured-data tasks, a benchmark-correct answer can be produced by an invalid trace. This paper introduces Trace Integri...
arXiv:2608.29128v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tool-using agents are commonly evaluated by a single bit: whether an end-to-end workflow completed. This metric fails to distinguish failures that matt...
By Zelin Wan, Arash Nourian, Xiaoxiao Li, Nihar Nandan, Kamalakannan Nandagopal
The paper argues that answer accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating large language model (LLM) data agents, especially in structured-data tasks where a correct answer can be produced by an invalid trace. It introduces Trace Integrity as a reliability criterion that ensures the computation behind an answer is explicit, executable, schema-valid, operator-faithful, replayable, answer-consistent, and auditable. The authors operationalize this concept with execution contracts and present the CAIT (Correct Answer / Invalid Trace) Rate to quantify how often answer-only evaluations mistakenly reward unsupported outputs, demonstrating that accuracy, trace validity, and silent-failure risk are distinct signals.
By Srimonti Dutta, Akshata Kishore Moharir
arXiv:2606. 13904v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploratory question answering (EQA) over data lakes requires an LLM agent to discover relevant sources, analyze retrieved data, and adapt its actions based on intermediate results.
By Austin Senna Wijaya, Jiaxiang Liu, Haonan Wang, Eugene Wu
arXiv:2610.02122v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Real-world enterprise data science and analytics workflows require reasoning across dozens of tables, performing statistical analyses, and acting on...
By Gabriel Tomitsuka, Arman Raayatsanati, Emma Xing, Duke Gand, Joseph J Ma
arXiv:2606. 01365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems spend computation through model tokens, tool calls, retries, and code execution before producing an answer.
By Xianyou Li, Weiran Yan, Yichao Wu, Penghao Liang, Mengwei Yuan, Jianan Liu, Jing Yang