Counterfactual Trace Auditing detects 522 behavioral change patterns from skills on 49 tasks where pass rates shift only 0.3 points on average.
Beyond the Final Answer: Evaluating the Reasoning Trajectories of Tool-Augmented Agents
4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Although recent tool-augmented benchmarks involve complex requests, evaluation remains limited to answer matching, neglecting critical trajectory aspects like efficiency, hallucination, and adaptivity. The most straightforward method for evaluation is to compare an agent's trajectory with the ground-truth, but annotating all valid ground-truth trajectories is prohibitively expensive. In this manner, we introduce TRACE, a reference-free framework for the multi-dimensional evaluation of tool-augmented LLMs. By incorporating an evidence bank which accumulates knowledge from preceding steps, TRACE assesses an agent's reasoning trajectory effectively. To validate our framework, we develop a new meta-evaluation dataset with diverse and flawed trajectories, each labeled with multi-faceted performance scores. Our results confirm that TRACE accurately evaluates complex trajectories even with small open-source LLMs. Furthermore, we apply our method to evaluate the trajectories that agents produce while solving tool-augmented tasks, presenting previously unreported observations and their corresponding insights.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 4roles
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Empirical study finds Progressive Disclosure raises distinct resources touched (1.18 to 3.85) and uptake events (1.33 to 3.92) per trajectory, adds 17 passing trials out of 410 (+4.1%), with gains task-dependent.
A two-stage probe (hidden-state estimate plus attention-based correction) yields per-step GRPO rewards that survive prefix contamination and beat external-judge and tree-search rewards in the reported benchmarks.
Ada is a scoped apparatus that records SWE-agent trajectories in real repositories and applies observation lenses to project navigation, evidence selection, synthesis, grounding, and stopping behaviors across 408 runs.
citing papers explorer
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Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills
Counterfactual Trace Auditing detects 522 behavioral change patterns from skills on 49 tasks where pass rates shift only 0.3 points on average.
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SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior
Empirical study finds Progressive Disclosure raises distinct resources touched (1.18 to 3.85) and uptake events (1.33 to 3.92) per trajectory, adds 17 passing trials out of 410 (+4.1%), with gains task-dependent.
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PAIR: Prefix-Aware Internal Reward Model for Multi-Turn Agent Optimization
A two-stage probe (hidden-state estimate plus attention-based correction) yields per-step GRPO rewards that survive prefix contamination and beat external-judge and tree-search rewards in the reported benchmarks.
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Projecting the Emerging Mindset of SWE Agent by Launching a Wild Code Understanding Journey
Ada is a scoped apparatus that records SWE-agent trajectories in real repositories and applies observation lenses to project navigation, evidence selection, synthesis, grounding, and stopping behaviors across 408 runs.