What Twelve LLM Agent Benchmark Papers Disclose About Themselves: A Pilot Audit and an Open Scoring Schema
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
Abstract (arXiv)
We read twelve well-known LLM agent benchmark papers and recorded, dimension by dimension, what each paper actually says about how its evaluation was run. The motivation came from a familiar frustration: two papers will report results on the same benchmark with the same model name and disagree, and you cannot tell why -- the scaffold, the sampling settings, the subset, or the evaluator version. In many cases the published artifact does not let you answer. This paper is an implementation report on the attempt. We designed a small audit schema (five fields: benchmark identity, harness specification, inference settings, cost reporting, failure breakdown), wrote a scoring codebook with the boundary cases we hit during pilot scoring, applied it to twelve canonical papers (eight agent, four classical static), and recorded what we saw. We score the disclosure of an agent run, not its correctness, and make no claim that disclosure implies a trustworthy result. The mean audit score across the eight agent-benchmark papers is 0.38 (out of 1.0), and across the four classical static benchmarks 0.66; the largest gap is on cost (none of the eight agent benchmark papers disclose inference cost in any form) and on harness specification (none fully disclose a content-addressed container image of the evaluation environment). We release the schema as a JSON Schema file, the codebook as a Markdown document, and the raw scoring sheet as a CSV. The scoring was performed by a single auditor in one pass; a multi-rater audit is the natural next step, and we discuss what we think it would change.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 21 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 May 2026.
Builds on
21 of 23 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2024AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agents24 Jan
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Other references · 19
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7 more
- 2017Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matterscited by 754
- 2024MLE-bench: Evaluating Machine Learning Agents on Machine Learning Engineeringcited by 469
- 2020Improving Reproducibility in Machine Learning Research (A Report from the NeurIPS 2019 Reproducibility Program)cited by 322
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
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- 2026Measuring Harness-Induced Belief Divergence in Multi-Step LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026ParEvalLayer: When Partial LLM-Agent Evaluations Support a Decisioncited by 1
- 2026LLM-based Agents for Forecasting and Prediction: Methods, Training, Evaluation, and Applicationscited by 1
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separationcited by 0
- 2026LLM-based Agents for Forecasting and Prediction: Methods, Training, Evaluation, and Applications24 Aug 2026
- 2026When Is an Agent Evaluation Over? Outcome Finality and Cross-Unit Separation14 Aug 2026
- 2026ParEvalLayer: When Partial LLM-Agent Evaluations Support a Decision3 Aug 2026
- 2026Measuring Harness-Induced Belief Divergence in Multi-Step LLM Agents5 Jul 2026
- 2026Autonomous Research Agents: A Survey of AI Scientists and the Verification Gap29 Jun 2026
- 2026Reading Task Failure Off the Activations: A Sparse-Feature Audit of GPT-2 Small on Indirect Object Identification21 May 2026
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