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Main Authors: Watanabe, Chihiro, Sun, Jingyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16131
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author Watanabe, Chihiro
Sun, Jingyu
author_facet Watanabe, Chihiro
Sun, Jingyu
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents to solve complex tasks such as question answering (QA), scientific debate, and software development. A standard evaluation procedure aggregates multiple responses from LLM agents into a single final answer, often via majority voting, and compares it against reference answers. However, this process can obscure the quality and distributional characteristics of the original responses. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework based on the empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF) of cosine similarities between generated responses and reference answers. This enables a more nuanced assessment of response quality beyond exact match metrics. To analyze the response distributions across different agent configurations, we further introduce a clustering method for ECDFs using their distances and the $k$-medoids algorithm. Our experiments on a QA dataset demonstrate that ECDFs can distinguish between agent settings with similar final accuracies but different quality distributions. The clustering analysis also reveals interpretable group structures in the responses, offering insights into the impact of temperature, persona, and question topics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_16131
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function Clustering for LLM-based Agent System Analysis
Watanabe, Chihiro
Sun, Jingyu
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents to solve complex tasks such as question answering (QA), scientific debate, and software development. A standard evaluation procedure aggregates multiple responses from LLM agents into a single final answer, often via majority voting, and compares it against reference answers. However, this process can obscure the quality and distributional characteristics of the original responses. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework based on the empirical cumulative distribution function (ECDF) of cosine similarities between generated responses and reference answers. This enables a more nuanced assessment of response quality beyond exact match metrics. To analyze the response distributions across different agent configurations, we further introduce a clustering method for ECDFs using their distances and the $k$-medoids algorithm. Our experiments on a QA dataset demonstrate that ECDFs can distinguish between agent settings with similar final accuracies but different quality distributions. The clustering analysis also reveals interpretable group structures in the responses, offering insights into the impact of temperature, persona, and question topics.
title Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function Clustering for LLM-based Agent System Analysis
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16131