XYEval: Agents say yes to bad advice
Effective communication between users and AI agents is essential for human-AI collaboration. The XY problem is a well-known communication pitfall where a person asks about their attempted solution rather than their actual problem. We extend prior sycophancy evaluation to the XY problem in agentic settings, evaluating whether agents can resist plausible but misleading suggestions from users and communicate their reasoning. We introduce XYEval, a meta-evaluation framework that can transform an existing benchmark into an XY problem evaluation. We evaluate five models across six diverse benchmark suites. Agents suffer large XY drops under XY mutation across benchmarks, with relative drops rea...
| Authors | Zhengxuan Wu, Yuxuan Li, Oyvind Tafjord et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 September 2026 |
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