arXiv:2607. 15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI benchmarks increasingly leverage item-level statistical models, particularly item response theory (IRT), to estimate model capabilities, rank systems, select informative examples, and diagnose benchmark quality.
By Han Jiang, Sunbeom Kwon, Jinwen Luo, Ziang Xiao, Susu Zhang
arXiv:2608. 05086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models differ in how safely they behave and these differences are measured by safety benchmarks.
By Joshua Fonseca Rivera (Independent), Neil Shah (Independent), David Demitri Africa (UK AI Security Institute), Konstantinos Voudouris (UK AI Security Institute)
The paper introduces Monte Carlo Query Search (MCQS), an active query‑synthesis method for learning symbolic stochastic capability models of black‑box AI agents. MCQS treats capability evaluation as an active learning problem over policies, using Monte Carlo tree search to generate queries that distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic capability hypotheses. Experiments demonstrate that MCQS learns accurate capability models more efficiently than baseline strategies, enabling systematic characterization of agent capability boundaries with fewer interactions.
By Daniel Bramblett, Rushang Karia, Adrian Ciotinga, Pulkit Verma, YooJung Choi, Siddharth Srivastava
arXiv:2605. 28591v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings.
By Katharina Deckenbach, Haritz Puerto, Jonas Geiping, Sahar Abdelnabi
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
arXiv:2608. 06202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) benchmark evaluations are routinely used to support claims about model safety, reliability, and deployment readiness.
By Ro Encarnaci\'on, Tina Behzad, Emma Lurie, Dana\'e Metaxa
The paper introduces SCOPE, a method that post‑trains computer‑use agents to balance task completion with safety by conditioning actions on environmental risk. It combines supervised fine‑tuning on three trajectory types—capability demonstrations, safe continuations, and explicit refusals—followed by reinforcement learning to improve performance. Experiments starting from Qwen3.5‑9B show that SCOPE‑RL achieves high task success and attack‑avoidance rates, outperforming other agents on OSWorld and OS‑BLIND benchmarks.
By Zeyu Kang, Zhenyun Yin, Yang Zhang, Shan He, Shanzhe Lei, Yanjiu Zhong, Xinquan Chen, Yuhong Wang
arXiv:2605. 27914v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Benchmarking is mature where answers are verifiable -- math, code, reasoning -- but the fastest-growing uses of LLMs are subjective and human-facing: companionship, emotional support, counseling.
By Yuming (Rapheal), Huang, Yao Liu, Pengjie Ding, Lei Wang, Junchen Wan
arXiv:2512. 16733v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Black-box AI (BBAI) systems, including foundation-model agents, are increasingly used for sequential decision making.
By Daniel Bramblett, Rushang Karia, Adrian Ciotinga, Pulkit Verma, YooJung Choi, Siddharth Srivastava
arXiv:2605. 00737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI architectures augment LLMs with external tools, unlocking strong capabilities.
By Qinyuan Wu, Soumi Das, Mahsa Amani, Arijit Nag, Seungeon Lee, Krishna P. Gummadi, Abhilasha Ravichander, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
The paper investigates Self‑Generated Text Recognition (SGTR), the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify their own outputs. By evaluating 13–21 models across 6 experimental designs, it shows that SGTR accuracy varies with evaluation format, conversation structure, and task domain, and that a quality‑heuristic bias dominates results. The study also finds that fine‑tuning for SGTR in one setting can generalize to others and may cause models to prefer their own outputs when judging, highlighting potential safety concerns.
By Jesse St. Amand, Callum Canavan, Sohaib Imran, Joseph Hewson, Aaron Lutz, Shi Feng, Puria Radmard, Lennie Wells
The paper demonstrates that Item Response Theory (IRT) can uncover meaningful structure in safety benchmarks for language models, allowing adaptive item selection to approximate full benchmark rankings with Spearman’s ρ > 0.90 while cutting evaluation costs by at least 80% and up to 99.9% on some suites. It also proposes a static method to extract a small, informative subset of items that can be reused across models, achieving 80–99.8% cost savings. These findings show that psychometric techniques can make safety evaluation more efficient without sacrificing ranking accuracy.
By Fabio Spagliardi, M\'irian Silva, Ayan Datta, Aiden Zhou, Vamshi Bonagiri, Diogo Cruz