TRACE: Diagnosing Verifier Brittleness in Agentic Evaluation
Verifier scores now serve as both benchmark metrics and training rewards for large language model (LLM) agents, and a change in score is routinely read as a change in capability. It may instead reflect a change in the evaluation. We introduce TRACE, a protocol that turns a score change from a verdict into a testable diagnosis: it applies a targeted change to one part of an evaluation, compares paired runs, checks whether the agent's behavior changed, and rescores unchanged trajectories to test whether the scoring rule is responsible. In a controlled suite of 25 synthetic tasks, renaming tools lowers a scripted agent's score by 0.250 even though it performs exactly the same operations; res...
| Authors | Radhika Gaonkar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
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