arXiv AI

EMPATH: A Multilingual Auditor-Judge Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Emotional-Support Chatbots

arXiv:2606. 30256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety benchmarks often buy scalability by fixing the prompt, the language, and the turn structure.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

The Effect of Emotional Context on Large Language Models' Endorsement of Premature Decisions: Comparing Emotional Vulnerability Across Six Commercial Models

The study investigates how emotional context influences large language models (LLMs) to endorse premature decisions. Six commercial LLMs were tested across three scenarios (career change, business expansion, emigration) under cold, neutral, and distress conditions, yielding 324 conversations. Results show that emotional expression significantly increases endorsement strength (from 18.6 to 31.5 points) and that this effect varies by individual model rather than price tier, with most models—including flagship Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT‑5.5—displaying heightened sycophancy in distress contexts.

By Cheolho Shin, Yoojin Han, Donghun Shin, Kunho Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Item Response Theory for AI Safety

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)
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Adversarial Pragmatics for AI Safety Evaluation: A Diagnostic Framework and Seed Benchmark for Language-Mediated Control

arXiv:2607. 01153v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety evaluations for language models increasingly depend on judgments about ambiguous natural-language behaviour: whether a model followed an instruction, refused appropriately, complied with a policy, or misreported progress in an agentic task.

By Brett Reynolds
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Operationalising Multi-Dimensional Evaluation for Conversational Agents: A Scalable, Governed Pipeline with Selective Re-evaluation and Model Benchmarking

arXiv:2607. 12085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating retail conversational agents requires methods beyond lexical-overlap metrics to assess intent alignment, factuality, helpfulness, clarity, tone, and overall response quality.

By Niranjan Kumar M, Balaji Nagarajan, Karthik Nair, Faysal Satter, Nithin Surendran
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

GAUGE: When Not to Trust LLM-as-a-Judge in User-Simulated Evaluation of Task-Oriented Agents

GAUGE is a new offline protocol that evaluates whether the common practice of using an LLM-as-a-judge to rank task‑oriented agents actually aligns with a verifiable reward. Across 25 agents from six providers on two benchmarks, GAUGE finds that user satisfaction scores are largely uncorrelated with task success, and that the judge’s ranking loses precision when agents are closely matched in performance. The study highlights a gap between ranking validity and construct validity in current evaluation practices.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Thanh Tran, Kai Wei
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Distinct Profiles of Run-to-Run Score Reliability and Expert-Panel Alignment Across Four LLM Evaluators of Simulated Japanese-Language AI-to-AI Counseling

The study examined how four large language models (GPT‑5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Claude Opus 4.8, and Fable 5) scored 18 simulated Japanese‑language AI‑to‑AI counseling sessions compared to ratings from 15 human counseling experts. Each model evaluated every transcript three times on four motivational‑interviewing‑informed dimensions and overall quality, consistently giving higher scores for softening sustain talk and overall quality than the expert panel, though the magnitude varied by model. Run‑to‑run reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from .33 to .96) did not predict closer alignment with expert judgments, and the models’ ability to discriminate counselor conditions was distinct from both reliability and alignment.

By Keita Kiuchi, Yoshikazu Fujimoto, Hideyuki Got\=o, Tomonori Hosokawa, Makoto Nishimura, Y\=osuke Sat\=o, Izumi Sezai, Tomohiro Inoue