arXiv Computation and Language By Radhika Gaonkar

TRACE: Diagnosing Verifier Brittleness in Agentic Evaluation

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper introduces TRACE, a protocol designed to diagnose whether changes in verifier scores for large language model agents reflect actual changes in agent behavior or merely alterations in the evaluation process. TRACE works by applying targeted changes to evaluation components, running paired experiments, and re‑scoring unchanged trajectories to isolate the source of score variation. Experiments on synthetic tasks and public benchmark tasks demonstrate that seemingly significant score shifts can often be attributed to evaluation artifacts, while TRACE can also detect genuine behavioral changes.

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