The paper introduces GRADE, a graph-based representation of large language model (LLM) agent executions that captures both execution steps and their dependencies. By adding graded dependency edges—observed, declared, or inferred—to the trace, the authors evaluate how this dependency layer affects failure prediction across six corpora involving tool use, coding, and web tasks. Experiments show that the dependency block can improve prediction in some settings, but its effectiveness varies with the evaluation probe and corpus, and controlled experiments demonstrate that the observed structure is not merely a degree-matched artifact.
arXiv:2609.00756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) asks whether a fine, span-level and a coarse, document-level task help each other when one model handles both. We...
The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) asks whether a fine, span-level and a coarse, document-level task help each other when one model handles both. We test it in multimodal document understanding on...
arXiv:2609.11987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An agentic coding system couples a language model to a harness: the tools, prompts and control flow that turn a chat model into an autonomous softwar...
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.
The paper evaluates CASCADE, a fully local layered defense for Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based systems, by conducting a component ablation and corpus audit on a fixed 5,000-sample dataset. It demonstrates that the choice of aggregation convention heavily influences reported metrics, that detection performance varies with provenance, and that the released configuration does not fully disclose the operating point. The study also shows that a local review model invoked for a third of requests does not alter classification outcomes, highlighting the importance of reproducibility and transparency in defense evaluations.
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
The study evaluates large language model (LLM) graders on two computer‑science exams, testing 171 configurations of closed‑ and open‑weights models. While the best LLM configuration achieved a mean absolute error of 1.64/35—better than the 2.61/35 error between two human graders—its performance was highly sensitive to the prompt. A short "strict grader" preamble caused most open‑weight models to exceed acceptable error thresholds or stop grading entirely, whereas fine‑tuning with a single LoRA adapter restored parity with human graders and reduced sensitivity to harsh prompts.
arXiv:2608. 10216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent frameworks ship quality gates that compare text blocks by embedding-cosine similarity and decide at a fixed cutoff.
The study investigates how multi‑harness reinforcement learning (RL) affects coding agents by comparing two grouping strategies—Within (one group per task‑harness pair) and Cross (harnesses pooled within a task)—using a Qwen3‑8B policy trained on frozen task‑harness records from Aider, OpenHands, Qwen Code, and SWE‑agent. Across 24,000 sealed evaluations, the choice of evaluation harness dramatically increases solve rates (from 2.14 % to 9.27 %), while the grouping rule has a negligible effect. Both grouping rules yield similar gains on the same source harness, and Cross‑harness credit does not improve portability beyond Within‑harness credit, suggesting that multi‑harness RL reports should specify grouping boundaries and test on unseen harnesses.
The paper introduces AgentDiff, a metric that quantifies how much LLM agents’ answers differ when inputs are altered by meaning‑bearing rewrites (paraphrases, synonym substitutions) versus presentation changes (reordering, formatting, distractors). Across 68 model–benchmark–scaffold combinations involving ten LLMs and over 1,500 questions, meaning‑bearing rewrites consistently produce a roughly 20‑percentage‑point higher inconsistency rate than presentation changes, a gap that persists across severity proxies and remains significant even outside the Qwen family. Trace analysis reveals that meaning‑bearing rewrites preserve the first action but reduce thought similarity from the second step onward, extending the divergence cascade—a phenomenon termed “stealth divergence.”
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.
The paper investigates neural text degeneration by measuring the fixed‑point structure of short‑window argmax maps across 17 pretrained models, using 96 random two‑token starts without prompts. It finds a stable four‑way classification that varies across model families and scales, with some models funneling to a single endpoint token while others do not, and shows that this behavior is not solely determined by training data or corpus frequency. The study demonstrates that repetition phenomena are not uniformly explained by either training data or network architecture alone, highlighting the complexity of neural text generation dynamics.