What Process Evaluation of Coding Agents Actually Measures: Action, Task, and Step Are Three Different Levels
Coding agents are increasingly evaluated not only by whether they solve a task, but also by how they execute it. However, existing process-level evaluations often treat action prediction, task uncertainty, and step attribution as if they were the same problem, which makes it unclear what such evaluations actually measure. In this paper, we introduce a measurement framework for process evaluation in coding agents and instantiate step-level causal attribution with SCAE, a replay-based estimator derived from a structural causal model of agent execution. Our framework combines prefix-conditioned identification, replay/intervention-based estimation, and controlled judge-information manipulatio...
| Authors | Jiawei He, Mengyu Shi, Jie jia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 24 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 August 2026 |
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