The paper "trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories" examines the limitations of outcome-only evaluation for large language model agents. Using a deterministic tool‑using support‑desk environment with a scripted oracle policy and a fault injector, the authors compare five different judging approaches—programmatic rules, outcome‑only, step‑rubric at two model sizes, and a self‑consistency ensemble—on metrics such as detection, step localisation, fault typing, calibration, and cost across 400 trajectories. The study finds that outcome‑only judges miss many silent faults and generate false positives, while step‑rubric judges achieve higher recall with no false alarms but at greater cost, and that none of the judges read the final reply, allowing fabricated promises to evade detection.
"whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current production‑default outcome‑only evaluations can overlook critical failures in agent behavior, underscoring the need for more nuanced, step‑level judging methods to ensure reliable LLM agent performance."
By Hadi Mohammadi
arXiv:2609.00088v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: LLM judges, models that score another system's output, can be gamed by the systems they score. Recent work identifies one defence that works: the jud...
By Idil Gozel
arXiv:2607. 25152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running autonomous agents plan, act, and judge their own completion without human intervention.
By Hyundoo Park, Byungho Choi
arXiv:2607. 05904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a language model against its own reference-free judgments (the premise of self-rewarding, self-play, and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines) assumes a model's verdict on a shown answer tracks correctness.
By Chenyu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 12790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agent systems improve by creating, revising, and retiring their own skills, but every such loop rests on a hidden assumption: a reliable evaluation metric already exists.
By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
Agentic systems have widened the gap between producing candidate outputs and reviewing them. This paper asks a practical architectural question: should domain specialization be built into an evaluator's weights, or into the rule that decides when its judgment can be trusted?