用统计方法量化大模型评估中的不一致性,让结果更可信。
Stochasticity in Agentic Evaluations: Quantifying Inconsistency with Intraclass Correlation
- 引入组内相关系数(ICC)区分任务难度与模型自身波动
- 发现不同任务的ICC差异显著,复杂推理任务需32次以上测试才稳定
- 建议评估时同时报告准确率和ICC,提升实验可复现性
随着大语言模型成为更大智能体系统的一部分,评估可靠性变得至关重要:不可靠的子智能体会导致下游系统行为脆弱。然而当前评估实践仅报告单次运行的单一准确率,掩盖了结果背后的方差,无法区分真实能力提升与偶然采样。本文提出采用测量科学中的组内相关系数(ICC)来刻画这种方差。ICC将观测方差分解为查询间方差(任务难度)和查询内方差(智能体不一致),揭示报告结果是反映真实能力还是测量噪声。我们在GAIA(Level 1-3,衡量不同推理复杂度下的智能体能力)和FRAMES(衡量多文档检索与事实性)上进行评估。结果显示,ICC随任务结构变化显著:推理与检索任务(FRAMES)ICC为0.4955–0.7118,智能体任务(GAIA)ICC为0.304–0.774。在智能体系统中进行子智能体替换决策时,只有当ICC也提升,准确率提升才可信。我们证明,结构化任务在n=8–16次试验后ICC即收敛,复杂推理任务则需n≥32。建议将准确率与ICC、查询内方差一同报告作为标准实践,并提出包含这些指标的评估卡片。通过使评估稳定性可见,我们旨在将智能体评测从黑箱排行榜竞争转变为可信的实验科学。代码已开源:https://github.com/youdotcom-oss/stochastic-agent-evals。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As large language models become components of larger agentic systems, evaluation reliability becomes critical: unreliable sub-agents introduce brittleness into downstream system behavior. Yet current evaluation practice, reporting a single accuracy number from a single run, obscures the variance underlying these results, making it impossible to distinguish genuine capability improvements from lucky sampling. We propose adopting Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC), a metric from measurement science, to characterize this variance. ICC decomposes observed variance into between-query variance (task difficulty) and within-query variance (agent inconsistency), highlighting whether reported results reflect true capability or measurement noise. We evaluated on GAIA (Levels 1-3, measuring agentic capabilities across varying reasoning complexity) and FRAMES (measuring retrieval and factuality across multiple documents). We found that ICC varies dramatically with task structure, with reasoning and retrieval tasks (FRAMES) exhibit ICC=0.4955-0.7118 across models, and agentic tasks (GAIA) exhibiting ICC=0.304-0.774 across models. For sub-agent replacement decisions in agentic systems, accuracy improvements are only trustworthy if ICC also improves. We demonstrate that ICC converges by n=8-16 trials for structured tasks and n>=32 for complex reasoning, enabling practitioners to set evidence-based resampling budgets. We recommend reporting accuracy alongside ICC and within-query variance as standard practice, and propose updated Evaluation Cards capturing these metrics. By making evaluation stability visible, we aim to transform agentic benchmarking from opaque leaderboard competition to trustworthy experimental science. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/youdotcom-oss/stochastic-agent-evals.
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