HSPR: Recovering Software-Agent Benchmark Scores via Hierarchical Posterior Inference
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2609.01603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating software engineering agents on realistic benchmarks is costly, since each task may require multi-step code exploration, modification, and...
arXiv:2607. 27023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating large generative models across benchmarks is time-consuming and computationally expensive.
arXiv:2607. 12338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent benchmarks often compare two agents after all tasks have run, but costly evaluations make partial runs tempting.
Agent evaluations increasingly benchmark LLMs, but rankings can be swayed by evaluation conditions such as scaffolds or tasks, making reliability claim‑dependent. A Bayesian variance‑decomposition framework applied to 22 benchmarks shows that reliability varies with the measurement goal: fixed model‑scaffold systems rank reliably, while underlying‑model rankings are less stable. Scaffold choice can alter conclusions, and adding more tasks only modestly improves reliability when scaffold coverage is limited; however, pooling diverse benchmarks can substantially raise cross‑task ranking reliability and reduce cost.
arXiv:2604. 00594v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the focus in LLM-based coding shifts from static single-step code generation to multi-step agentic interaction with tools and environments, understanding which tasks will challenge agents and why becomes increasingly difficult.
The paper introduces Speculative Evaluation, a method to reduce variance in evaluating stochastic large language models (LLMs) under a fixed rollout budget. It employs a Hierarchical Bayesian Neyman (HBN) policy that first runs a short uniform pilot, then pools task-level success counts via a hierarchical Bayesian model to compute posterior expectations of task-level sampling variances. Using these expectations, the method applies exact positive-integer Neyman allocation to allocate rollouts, and an asynchronous variant (HBN-async) speculatively executes continuations from partial pilot feedback to mitigate synchronization overhead. Across six checkpoints and 18 benchmark groups, Speculative Evaluation achieves 12.8%-33.6% lower variance compared to uniform allocation, outperforming empirical and independent Bayesian baselines, and demonstrates practical benefits in real-generation experiments.