The paper introduces Janus, a method for validating error patterns in language models by comparing error rates across predefined yes/no properties and using shuffled decoy labels to set significance thresholds. Janus requires that a pattern’s error difference surpasses the decoy-derived threshold and is replicated on held‑out data before reporting. Experiments on a controlled code‑finding task confirm several meaningful error patterns, while on MuSiQue and LongBench v2 Janus reports no confirmed patterns for the tested properties, contrasting with standard shuffling tests that sometimes confirm patterns.
By Vyzantinos Repantis, Ameya Gawde, Harshvardhan Singh
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv:2608. 16003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated checking pipelines increasingly place one language model as the checker and another (or the same one) as the fixer.
By Parsa Mazaheri, Kasra Mazaheri
arXiv:2607. 14399v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluations of language-model honesty read the model's verdicts as evidence about the model.
By Justin Bronder (Corabo Inc.)
arXiv:2608. 05212v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search agents tackle challenging questions through long-horizon web interactions, a process that is both complex and fragile: small reasoning errors may propagate through long, noisy trajectories into fluent but incorrect answers.
By Zhixiang Liang, Yifei Liu, Yidan Huang, Haozhe Zhao, Beichen Huang, Jiaqi Wang, Nan Duan, Qiong Cao
arXiv:2609.14758v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool-augmented language models are evaluated on whether they reach the right answer, not on whether they report honestly when a tool fails to supply...
By Arham Sethi, Arsen Kenzhebayev, Saanvi Paturi, Vatsal Raina, Vyas Raina, Ivaxi Sheth
arXiv:2607. 11598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There are two standard ways to spend more compute at test time: let a model reason longer, or sample more attempts and keep one.
By Bojie Li, Noah Shi
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
By Esmail Gumaan
The paper introduces inexpensive, scalable methods for evaluating language model behavior across different vendors and releases. By running identical public stimuli on a cross‑vendor panel and analyzing transcripts via exact match, LLM‑coded codebooks, or instrumented environments, the authors can quantify model responses at a cost of a few dollars per model. Applying these tools to four years of releases reveals patterns of convergence, resistance, positional stability, and compliance that vary by generation, lab, and harness.
By Tapan Parikh
The paper audits a developer‑accessible on‑device language model, revealing that it can confidently produce incorrect answers while refusing benign prompts, a phenomenon termed task‑asymmetric miscalibration. The model’s confident outputs are surface‑indistinguishable, with classifiers based on user‑visible features failing to separate correct from wrong responses. The authors propose a model‑agnostic audit protocol, a surface‑indistinguishability test, and a black‑box consistency wrapper that improves reliability without requiring model access.
By Shashwat Pandey, Satwik Pandey, Suresh Raghu
arXiv:2609.06147v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Ask a language model the same question about the same document twenty times, and it sometimes returns two different answers. We built Probity, a benc...
By Seyed Mosayeb Alam
arXiv:2604. 16706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated evaluation of tool-using large language model (LLM) agents is widely assumed to be reliable, yet this assumption is rarely validated against human annotation.
By Bhaskar Gurram