arXiv:2606. 08529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Published agent capability scores conflate what a model can do with what its scaffold lets it do, and the magnitude of this elicitation gap is not well characterized under controlled conditions.
By Jason Starace
The paper examines safety routers—systems that route user requests to different language models—and finds that their performance degrades significantly when evaluated under distribution shift. In standard benchmarks, routers appear effective because the best single model is chosen from the same evaluation data, but when the data distribution changes, the routing advantage diminishes or disappears. The study quantifies this bias across multiple safety corpora, showing that routers offer little benefit under realistic shift conditions and that recognition‑based defenses can be undermined by attackers who know the model being used.
By Amit Singh Bhatti, Vishal Vaddina
arXiv:2608. 02665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form.
By Yongxi Zhou, Junwei Yao, Yuanzhe Liu, Zihan Dong, Wenbo Ye, Jiaxi Wen, Lai Yun Choi
Agent evaluations tell us that a model picked the wrong tool, but rarely why. We introduce canary tools: diagnostic probe tools planted in an agent's Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool set, each engineered to probe one specific tool-selection weakness.
arXiv:2607. 22585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public leaderboards for coding agents typically rank systems by model name and pass rate, while the surrounding harness (the scaffold that issues tools, manages context, and decides when to stop) is often under-specified.
By Naman Vats, Oleg Golev
arXiv:2608. 04719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent evaluations tell us that a model picked the wrong tool, but rarely why.
By Atul Anand, Sourav Chattaraj