GLIDE: Generalized Layer-wise Intrinsic Distributional Evaluation for Heterogeneous LLM Agents

LLM agents require reliable step-level evaluation to compare candidate branches and allocate computation effectively. However, lightweight evaluation remains challenging. External verifiers introduce additional inference cost, while agent-produced confidence or self-evaluation scores can be miscalibrated, especially when candidates are generated by heterogeneous agents. We propose Generalized Layer-wise Intrinsic Distributional Evaluation (GLIDE) for LLM agents. textscGLIDE derives intrinsic step evidence from layer-wise residual coherence, which measures whether local residual updates consistently support the global residual change induced by a candidate step. It calibrates this evidence against the recent score distribution of the generating agent and converts it into a pessimistic reward that jointly accounts for absolute residual evidence and agent-relative standing. The reward provides a cross-agent value signal for MCTS branch selection, while normalized predictive uncertainty guides adaptive branching. Experiments on multi-hop reasoning, sequential decision making, and symbolic logic show that textscGLIDE improves task performance, step-level ranking quality, and computational efficiency without external verifiers or task-specific supervision.