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Beyond the Final Answer: Evaluating the Reasoning Trajectories of Tool-Augmented Agents

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
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.

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cs.AI 3 cs.SE 1

years

2026 4

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representative citing papers

Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills

cs.AI · 2026-05-12 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

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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Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.