BenchGuard: Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Tu, Xinming, Wang, Tianze, Yingzhou, Lu, Huang, Kexin, Qu, Yuanhao, Mostafavi, Sara
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Tu, Xinming
Wang, Tianze
Yingzhou
Lu
Huang, Kexin
Qu, Yuanhao
Mostafavi, Sara
author_facet Tu, Xinming
Wang, Tianze
Yingzhou
Lu
Huang, Kexin
Qu, Yuanhao
Mostafavi, Sara
contents As benchmarks grow in complexity, many apparent agent failures are not failures of the agent at all - they are failures of the benchmark itself: broken specifications, implicit assumptions, and rigid evaluation scripts that penalize valid alternative approaches. We propose employing frontier LLMs as systematic auditors of evaluation infrastructure, and realize this vision through BenchGuard, the first automated auditing framework for task-oriented, execution-based agent benchmarks. BenchGuard cross-verifies all benchmark artifacts via structured LLM protocols, optionally incorporating agent solutions or execution traces as additional diagnostic evidence. Deployed on two prominent scientific benchmarks, BenchGuard identified 12 author-confirmed issues in ScienceAgentBench - including fatal errors rendering tasks unsolvable - and exactly matched 83.3% of expert-identified issues on the BIXBench Verified-50 subset, catching defects that prior human review missed entirely. A full audit of 50 complex bioinformatics tasks costs under USD 15, making automated benchmark auditing a practical and valuable complement to human review. These findings point toward AI-assisted benchmark development, where frontier models serve not only as subjects of evaluation but as active participants in validating the evaluation infrastructure itself.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24955
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BenchGuard: Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks
Tu, Xinming
Wang, Tianze
Yingzhou
Lu
Huang, Kexin
Qu, Yuanhao
Mostafavi, Sara
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
As benchmarks grow in complexity, many apparent agent failures are not failures of the agent at all - they are failures of the benchmark itself: broken specifications, implicit assumptions, and rigid evaluation scripts that penalize valid alternative approaches. We propose employing frontier LLMs as systematic auditors of evaluation infrastructure, and realize this vision through BenchGuard, the first automated auditing framework for task-oriented, execution-based agent benchmarks. BenchGuard cross-verifies all benchmark artifacts via structured LLM protocols, optionally incorporating agent solutions or execution traces as additional diagnostic evidence. Deployed on two prominent scientific benchmarks, BenchGuard identified 12 author-confirmed issues in ScienceAgentBench - including fatal errors rendering tasks unsolvable - and exactly matched 83.3% of expert-identified issues on the BIXBench Verified-50 subset, catching defects that prior human review missed entirely. A full audit of 50 complex bioinformatics tasks costs under USD 15, making automated benchmark auditing a practical and valuable complement to human review. These findings point toward AI-assisted benchmark development, where frontier models serve not only as subjects of evaluation but as active participants in validating the evaluation infrastructure itself.
title BenchGuard: Who Guards the Benchmarks? Automated Auditing of LLM Agent Benchmarks
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24955