Credit Without Ground Truth: Auditing Step-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Agents Against Executed Replay
Audited against policy-conditional ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals we audit -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- shows reliable incremental fidelity beyond its own marginal-matched shuffled control. Correcting for replay-target reliability leaves implicit fidelity bounded near zero and judge fidelity inconclusive at the achieved target reliability. Existing evaluations grade these signals against annotated step *correctness*; we audit them against step *contribution* -- what re-sampling the policy's own alternatives at each decision point and rolling...
| Authors | Haiyue Zhang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 20 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 August 2026 |
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