A minimal benchmark design and candidate reporting metrics for user-conditioned adaptation are proposed and a concrete design requirement for future personal-agent evaluation, with metrics used as reporting tools for that requirement.
Abstract
Personal agents maintain memories, learned skills, tool configurations, and policy state that evolve with each user. Existing agent benchmarks often evaluate these capabilities in isolation: tool benchmarks test invocation under fixed APIs, memory benchmarks test recall or forgetting, and safety benchmarks test static policy compliance. We argue that personal-agent evaluation requires a different protocol: replaying the same temporal intervention across different persistent user-conditioned states and measuring how failures propagate across agent components. We formalize this requirement as four conditions: explicit temporal intervention, persistent state across the intervention, induced cross-dimensional effects, and variation in user-conditioned state. A focused audit of public benchmark protocols selected by explicit inclusion criteria identifies several close cases. Under our explicitly narrow operationalization, we did not find a protocol in that audited set satisfying all four conditions. This claim is scoped as a focused gap analysis with bounded literature coverage. This position paper proposes a minimal benchmark design and candidate reporting metrics for user-conditioned adaptation. The result is a concrete design requirement for future personal-agent evaluation, with metrics used as reporting tools for that requirement.
Personalized agents must decide whether retrieved user memory should be used, ignored, updated, or queried before it affects a current task. We use this setting to develop an empirical audit protocol for structured intermediate outputs: first audit dataset shortcuts, then isolate bundled prompt changes, check whether intermediate labels are answer-associated, test decomposed semantic evidence, and audit provider-level execution failures. A 480-example synthetic development set initially suggested large gains from a state-structured prompt bundle, but TF-IDF diagnostics showed lexical separability and no positive standalone Ignore cases. We therefore construct a frozen 160-example controlled counterfactual set with 40 matched four-way families and rule-derived reference policies. On this set, exposing the four state definitions improves accuracy, but an isolated explicit state-output field does not significantly improve policy accuracy for Llama-3.3-70B and gives only a marginal, non-significant gain for GPT-OSS-120B. Supplying benchmark-associated state labels shifts policy predictions, but because those labels deterministically map to policies, this is a label-conditioning diagnostic rather than evidence of a faithful internal mechanism. Family-level and seed-stability analyses further show that example-level accuracy overstates counterfactual consistency: complete four-way family success is rare. An exploratory follow-up that elicits decomposed semantic evidence also fails to improve routing for the cleanly evaluated endpoint; the corresponding GPT-OSS condition was unavailable because of provider-side request validation. We evaluate policy classification only, not downstream responses, tool actions, or memory-store mutation.
Yihang Chen, Pinyan Qian, Su Wang et al.· 0 citations
Agent benchmarks increasingly evaluate repository editing, web research, terminal use, and long-horizon interaction. Their scores support capability claims only when the evaluation protocol keeps the intended capability necessary for success. Recent reward-hacking benchmarks and system reports show that agents can instead recover public solutions, read evaluation artifacts, infer generator structure, manipulate feedback, or benefit from invalid scoring paths; existing responses do not provide a common procedure for attributing these shortcuts and quantifying their effect across benchmarks. We formulate protocol validity and introduce HackDetect, a post-hoc audit that identifies an exposure, determines how the agent used it, and assesses whether the resulting score is misleading. We quantify score inflation with the Mislead gap, defined as the exploit score minus the intended score. We audit 2,385 traces across 15 agent benchmarks and find evidence of exposures and reward hacking in 67.0% of Frontier Science traces and 66.7% of AutoLab tasks. Across paired comparisons, we measure score inflation of 0.45-1.00, showing that benchmark reports should provide evidence that scores reflect the intended capability.
Jiaqi Shao, Hanck Chen, Wei Zhang et al.· 3 citations
The Personal Agent Sycophancy Benchmark (PASB) is introduced, a 1,600-task benchmark that traces whether a conversational claim is accepted, written into durable agent state, and reused in a later neutral query, and shows that agent sycophancy is fundamentally a state-writing governance problem.
Xutao Mao, Liang Zhao, Leyao Wang et al.· 0 citations
IBA-Bench is introduced, a benchmark for implicit behavioral alignment constructed from longitudinal interaction histories that contain noise, implicit cues, and temporal inconsistencies, and the proposed IBA-Agent is proposed, an agent framework that reconciles conflicting priorities through broad retrieval and trajectory-level alignment.
Jiajia Song, Bobo Li, Haiwen Yi et al.· 0 citations
Results show that a fixed-weight, self-evolving harness can revise, recover, and accumulate verified approaches while producing structured trajectories for future supervised and reinforcement learning.
Boxiu Li, Zimo Wen, Yijia Fan et al.· 2 citations· ⚡1
The PAST-Bench benchmark is introduced, a benchmark designed to isolate how persistent agents can progress from retaining experience to systematically improving through it, and Hermes+ is developed, which raises the average gain from retained experience and provides clearer pathway evidence.
Shuhan Xue, Zixin Ding, Yi-Jun Shen et al.· 2 citations
