Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness
End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effe...
| Authors | Sawyer Zhang, Alexander Wang, Sophie Lei |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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