EvalCEGAR is a pool of small Python operators that each flag a candidate for one named defect, or abstain, and vote, and borrows counterexample-guided abstraction refinement from program verification to score agents against a reliable automatic metric.
Abstract
Agents improve quickly against a reliable automatic metric and stall without one, and the applications that need them most, report generation among them, are the ones nobody knows how to score. Can the metric write itself? Saying what makes an answer good is hard; pointing at something wrong with one is easier, so the metric we evolve is a pool of small Python operators that each flag a candidate for one named defect, or abstain, and vote. Asking a model for operators directly does not work: 183 candidates realise only 96 distinct behaviours, from one narrow region of an enormous space. EvalCEGAR instead borrows counterexample-guided abstraction refinement from program verification. It reads the pool as an abstraction and searches for a collision, two answers the operators score identically, one correct and one not. That pair, not a prompt, is the authoring request, and when a collision defeats every attempt the loop widens what an operator may read rather than resampling. On MBPP+ and HumanEval+, a sandbox whose hidden unit tests give exact ground truth, the loop writes a 55-line operator that closes 15.4% of the gap between flagging nothing and a perfect filter on 428 unseen tasks (+0.0065, p=0.0010) at a quarter of our best hand-written operator's flags. On the benchmark it never saw it matches that operator's effect exactly on a third of the flags. Six of eight runs admit such an operator and all six help out of sample; our 15 hand-written operators applied together as one filter lose accuracy. An LLM judge on the same information ties that delta on a nearly disjoint set of candidates, and charges a model call per candidate forever where the operator charges none.
This work measures the capability that role assumes and finds it lacking under the protocol the role is usually deployed with, one-shot greedy authoring with no test-time reasoning.
Wenhui Chen, Jianlin Chen, Ziyao Lin et al.· 0 citations
Three conditions over one byte-identical prompt separate a grammar's two jobs: it fixes where generation stops as well as which tokens may be emitted, and both preregistered language claims fail.
In 2019, OpenAI released two million GPT-2 outputs-ungrammatical, half broken-to aid the detection of machine-generated text to aid the detection of machine-generated text.
Self-evolving agent systems create, revise, and retire their own skills, but every such loop assumes a reliable evaluation metric already exists. In many real applications none does. We show the metric itself can be the evolving object: our loop searches compositions of small typed drawback detectors under a full evolutionary lifecycle, selecting for agreement with a ten-item anchored reference set and regularizing by consensus over unlabeled outputs. What evolves is the function that grades one output, never the fixed task sets it is scored on, and what comes out is an inspectable expression rather than an opaque judge. It is also valid: on code generation it gains 0.21 agreement with hidden ground truth on a locked set that metric selection never reads (paired $p=0.014$), beating the bare LLM judge it contains. Validity is where safety lives: removing the anchor guards collapses the metric into a vacuous always-pass detector while removing the detector lifecycle does not, inverting the lesson from skill evolution. That collapse warns this line of work that downstream task score cannot validate a self-evolved evaluator, since the collapsed metric trains skills just as well. Task score answers only sufficiency, and an evolved metric suffices: \emph{Double Ratchet}, co-evolving the metric with a lifecycle-managed skill loop, retains 88--110\% of the lift ground truth or a hand-written rubric buys, across MBPP+, Spider~2.0-Snow, and report generation. When evolved skills gamed the report rubric, an independent judge caught it and one added detector repaired it.
Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Ya Cui et al.· 0 citations
Large language models have made natural language interfaces to databases (NLIDB) newly credible, but LLM text-to-SQL systems fail in a way that matters for deployment: a hallucinated column or a mis-aggregated total yields a fluent wrong answer, indistinguishable at the point of use from a right one. Where the consumer cannot inspect the generated query, as in enterprise AI deployments and operational dashboards, and increasingly where the consumer is a tool-using agent rather than a person, accuracy alone is insufficient: nothing marks which answers to distrust. This is a reliability problem before it is an accuracy problem. We propose an architectural pattern for such systems, a trusted kernel with a generative shell, resting on one invariant: a component that can fabricate may influence which question the system answers, never which value it returns. A generative shell interprets underspecified input and phrases replies; a deterministic kernel matches fully specified questions against a bounded set of answerable question shapes and compiles them to queries by deterministic execution. The two meet at a confirmation the user reads before any value is computed, and requests the kernel cannot express are declined rather than approximated. We call this structural abstention, and distinguish it from the statistical abstention of selective prediction and calibrated confidence: refusal here needs no confidence estimate, because unanswerable requests are unrepresentable. We specify the pattern implementation-independently, give a five-decision recipe and work it across three domains, extend the invariant from returned values to the actions of agentic systems, and report a two-year production case study alongside two generative alternatives, a fine-tuned parser and a tool-retrieval agent. We close against enterprise and reliability benchmarks published since.
Giving an agent a file about a named expert can supply hard-to-find material, produce a recognizable persona, or change what the agent decides. These are different claims. We test each one. mimeo is an open-source tool that finds a person's public work, checks each extracted quotation against the cached source text, and writes a file an agent can load. Eight logged builds averaged 38 model calls; the check rejects 13.2% of extracted quotations. We tested four expert files with one coding-agent harness. Knowledge access was clearest: mimeo answered all 20 obscure, quotation-heavy questions; no closed-book condition answered more than 10. Keyword search (BM25) over the same pages answered 15-17, a gap this sample cannot resolve. Grounding showed one clear benefit: personas written from model memory misstated a documented position on 1-4 of 20 answers under every grader; the plain agent and mimeo never did. Every persona was easy to spot on short open prompts, and adding task material lowered identification by 18-23 points. mimeo was no more identifiable than a from-memory profile. Judgment transfer remained unresolved because both tests hit their ceiling: every condition found 94-97% of the problems planted in engineering tasks and scored 94-100% on 16 new application scenarios. An AI-judged"sounds like the expert"score changed with the judge: two of four preferred answers based on a model's stereotype, while two found no difference on the same text. That is a caution against relying on a single AI judge. The evidence supports mimeo as a compact, inspectable reference on a person, not as a demonstrated transfer of their judgment. Toolkit and expert profiles: https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/mimeo
A new method, called CW-Net, translates the reasoning process of an autonomous vehicle’s AI system into understandable concepts that explain its behavior.
