arXiv AI By Victor Ojewale, Suresh Venkatasubramanian

What Benchmarks Don't Measure: The Case for Evaluating Abstention Competence in Autonomous Agents

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arXiv:2606. 02965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for autonomous agents measure whether agents complete tasks, yet this framing is systematically blind to whether an agent should have proceeded at all.

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arXiv AI
Sep 17

PACT: Can Enterprise AI Assistants Be Trusted Under Pressure?

The paper introduces PACT, a benchmark designed to evaluate how well enterprise AI assistants follow compliance rules when faced with various pressures such as persistent users or hurried managers. PACT covers twelve regulated domains and forty-eight realistic multi‑turn scenarios, pairing each rule with a shortcut that violates it and applying different pressures across wording and system‑prompt modes. Using PACT, the authors profile six metrics of compliance and aggregate them into a PACTScore, revealing significant variability among 22 LLM models and that even top performers misapply rules 6–10% of the time, with user pressure increasing violations by 65% on average.

By Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol
arXiv AI
5d ago

Safe Actions Alone Do Not Ensure Safe Agents: Identifying Unfulfilled Obligations with Guard Models

Guard models are used to prevent LLM agents from performing forbidden actions, but this alone does not guarantee safety. The paper shows that many agent trajectories contain unfulfilled safety‑critical obligations—actions that should have been performed—highlighting a new source of risk. To address this, the authors introduce ObligationBench, a benchmark of 240 expert‑validated trajectories, and develop ObligationGuard, a model that improves obligation detection recall and exact‑match rates over existing models.

By Youwei Feng, Yitong Zhang, Yuetong Liu, Jia Li