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arxiv: 2605.16551 · v1 · pith:Y53NXWCHnew · submitted 2026-05-15 · 💻 cs.CL

PQR: A Framework to Generate Diverse and Realistic User Queries that Elicit QA Agent Failures

Pith reviewed 2026-05-20 17:57 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CL
keywords query generationLLM agent evaluationfailure detectionrealistic user queriesQA testingiterative refinementunhelpful response detection
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The pith

PQR generates diverse realistic queries that surface 23-78 percent more unhelpful responses from LLM QA agents than prior methods.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper presents PQR, a framework that automatically creates user queries to test LLM-based QA agents for failures on objectives such as helpfulness. It uses two modules that interact iteratively: one rewrites queries to explore variations, while the other learns from past results to add new violation strategies and realism rules. This produces queries that both trigger agent mistakes and match the style of actual user questions, unlike purely adversarial approaches. When tested on an e-commerce QA agent, the method finds substantially more unhelpful outputs and yields queries rated as more diverse and realistic.

Core claim

PQR surfaces agent failures with respect to specific objectives while also resembling real users' intents through an iterative interaction between a query refinement module that explores diverse variations and a prompt refinement module that derives new objective-violating strategies and realism policies from prior feedback.

What carries the argument

Iterative interaction between the query refinement module for diverse variations and the prompt refinement module that updates strategies and realism policies from feedback.

If this is right

  • The framework uncovers 23 to 78 percent more unhelpful responses from the tested e-commerce QA agent.
  • Generated queries show higher diversity than those from previous automatic failure-discovery methods.
  • Generated queries show higher realism than those from previous automatic failure-discovery methods.
  • The approach extends beyond adversarial queries to include realistic user intents that still violate agent objectives.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same two-module loop could be applied to safety or factuality objectives in other agent domains such as customer support or education.
  • Combining the generated queries with a small set of human-written examples might further improve realism without much added cost.
  • If the feedback loop is made public, it could serve as a shared testbed for comparing different agent evaluation techniques.

Load-bearing premise

The prompt refinement module can reliably turn prior feedback into new strategies and realism policies that produce queries matching genuine user intents without artifacts.

What would settle it

Human raters judging the generated queries as less realistic or diverse than those from baseline methods, or the queries failing to increase the count of detected unhelpful agent responses by the reported margin.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.16551 by Arpit Sharma, Luigi Liu, Omar Yahia, Yunan Lu, Zhou Yu.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: An overview of PQR, which iteratively identifies realistic and diverse user queries that elicit agent failures through two modules: query refinement and prompt refinement. The query refinement module explores diverse query variations via rewrites, while the prompt refinement module aggregates prior feedback to derive new strategies for generating failure-triggering yet realistic queries. See Appendix D.5 a… view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Evaluating LLM-based agents remains challenging because identifying meaningful failure cases often requires substantial human effort to design realistic test scenarios. Prior works primarily focus on automatically discovering agent failures induced by adversarial users, while overlooking queries with real user intents that also trigger agent failures. We introduce PQR, a framework that not only surfaces agent failures with respect to specific objectives (e.g., helpfulness, safety, etc.) but also resembles real users' intents. PQR operates through an iterative interaction between two complementary modules. The query refinement module performs rewrites to explore diverse query variations, while the prompt refinement module uses prior feedback to derive new objective-violating strategies and realism policies for refining prompts, which in turn generate failure-triggering yet realistic queries. We evaluate PQR on detecting an e-commerce QA agent's unhelpful responses. Our method uncovers 23% - 78% more unhelpful responses, and our generated queries are more diverse and realistic compared to previous methods.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper introduces PQR, a framework for automatically generating diverse and realistic user queries that elicit failures (e.g., unhelpful responses) in LLM-based QA agents. PQR iterates between a query refinement module that rewrites queries to explore variations and a prompt refinement module that extracts objective-violating strategies and realism policies from prior feedback to generate new prompts. On an e-commerce QA agent task, the method is reported to uncover 23%-78% more unhelpful responses than prior approaches while producing queries that score higher on diversity and realism metrics.

Significance. If the core claims hold after proper validation, PQR would meaningfully advance automated red-teaming of LLM agents by shifting focus from purely adversarial queries to those that better approximate real user intents. The iterative feedback-driven policy derivation is a potentially useful technical contribution for balancing failure elicitation with realism. The work also highlights a gap in existing methods that the authors aim to close.

major comments (2)
  1. [§4] §4 (Evaluation): The abstract and experimental results claim 23%-78% more unhelpful responses and superior diversity/realism, yet provide no details on the number of trials, statistical significance tests, variance across runs, or exact baseline implementations and hyper-parameters. This omission makes it impossible to determine whether the reported gains are robust or sensitive to evaluation choices.
  2. [§3.2] §3.2 (Prompt Refinement Module): The central claim that the module derives generalizable objective-violating strategies and realism policies from feedback rests on an untested assumption that these policies avoid introducing LLM-specific artifacts or biases. No ablations, human judgments of policy outputs, or distributional comparisons against real user query logs are described, leaving open the possibility that measured improvements arise from artifactual query features rather than improved coverage of genuine user intents.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] The abstract refers to 'prior works' without naming them; adding 1-2 concrete citations would help situate the contribution.
  2. [§3] Notation for the two modules and the feedback loop could be made more consistent between the text description and any accompanying diagram.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 1 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive and detailed feedback. The comments highlight important areas for improving the clarity and rigor of our experimental reporting and validation of the prompt refinement module. We address each major comment below and commit to revisions that strengthen the manuscript without altering its core contributions.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [§4] §4 (Evaluation): The abstract and experimental results claim 23%-78% more unhelpful responses and superior diversity/realism, yet provide no details on the number of trials, statistical significance tests, variance across runs, or exact baseline implementations and hyper-parameters. This omission makes it impossible to determine whether the reported gains are robust or sensitive to evaluation choices.

    Authors: We agree that the evaluation details are insufficient for assessing robustness. In the revised manuscript, we will expand §4 to report that all results are averaged over 5 independent runs with different random seeds, include standard deviations for all metrics, add paired t-test results with p-values to establish statistical significance, and provide complete specifications for baseline implementations including exact model versions, hyper-parameters, and prompt templates. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [§3.2] §3.2 (Prompt Refinement Module): The central claim that the module derives generalizable objective-violating strategies and realism policies from feedback rests on an untested assumption that these policies avoid introducing LLM-specific artifacts or biases. No ablations, human judgments of policy outputs, or distributional comparisons against real user query logs are described, leaving open the possibility that measured improvements arise from artifactual query features rather than improved coverage of genuine user intents.

    Authors: We acknowledge the value of additional validation for the prompt refinement module. We will add an ablation study isolating the effect of the derived policies versus baseline prompting. We will also include a human evaluation where domain experts rate policy outputs and generated queries for realism and presence of LLM artifacts. For distributional comparisons to real user query logs, we note that such logs are not publicly available for the e-commerce QA setting due to privacy restrictions; we will discuss this limitation explicitly and suggest it for future work while arguing that the iterative feedback process promotes generalizability. revision: partial

standing simulated objections not resolved
  • Direct distributional comparisons against real user query logs, as no such public logs exist for the studied e-commerce domain.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: PQR framework is a design choice with empirical evaluation independent of self-referential inputs.

full rationale

The paper describes an iterative framework consisting of a query refinement module for diverse variations and a prompt refinement module that derives strategies and policies from prior feedback. No equations, fitted parameters, or derivations are shown that reduce any claimed result (such as 23%-78% more unhelpful responses or improved diversity) to the inputs by construction. The evaluation compares generated queries against previous methods on an e-commerce QA task, presenting these as measured outcomes rather than tautological renamings or self-defined predictions. The central mechanism is an LLM-driven refinement loop, which is a methodological assumption open to external validation rather than a load-bearing self-citation or ansatz smuggled via prior work. This qualifies as self-contained against external benchmarks with no exhibited reduction of outputs to inputs.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The paper relies on the assumption that the described modules function as intended to achieve the reported outcomes, with no free parameters explicitly fitted but implicit in the refinement strategies.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Iterative refinement between query and prompt modules can produce queries that are both diverse, realistic, and effective at eliciting agent failures.
    This is the core operating principle of the PQR framework as described.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5704 in / 1333 out tokens · 71995 ms · 2026-05-20T17:57:21.222845+00:00 · methodology

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