Evidence-First Agentic Verification
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.
AgentHorizon is a benchmark comprising 1,373 computer‑use tasks with instruction‑trajectory pairs collected from 166 hours of human‑recorded activity across three operating systems. The benchmark uses a paired design that swaps instructions to create negative tasks, testing judges’ ability to distinguish successful trajectories from those that completed a similar but incompatible request. Eleven judges were evaluated, with GPT‑5.5 achieving the highest balanced accuracy of 80.9% on the full trajectory subset, while tool‑use benefits some models but harms others, revealing large variability in judges’ performance.
arXiv:2610.19298v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for code usually rewards passing tests, which a model can do while remaining wrong on the inputs the tests do not cover. A progr...
The paper proposes a claim‑specific verification audit for modular agents that replaces aggregate task scores with evidence‑based evaluations. Each agent conclusion is recorded with supporting evidence and classified as supported, unsupported, unresolved, or not evaluated, along with the boundary of validity. The audit employs three tools—oracle policies, perfect component replacements, and verifier‑score tests—to trace value changes, locate lost value, and assess verifier effectiveness, demonstrated on a portfolio‑allocation agent in a synthetic market.
VeriHarness is a method that enhances verification for large language model agents tackling long‑horizon tasks without needing reference answers at test time. It transforms the base LLM into an agentic verifier by providing a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills, using disagreement resolution and consensus challenge to evaluate competing claims. Across five benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness outperforms baselines, achieving significant performance gains and demonstrating self‑improvement of verification skills from failure feedback.
AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.