ChromaFlow: A Negative Ablation Study of Orchestration Overhead in Tool-Augmented Agent Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mittal, Tarun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917509089722368
author Mittal, Tarun
author_facet Mittal, Tarun
contents Autonomous language-model agents increasingly combine planning, tool use, document processing, browsing, code execution, and verification loops. These capabilities make agent systems more useful, but they also introduce operational failure modes that are not visible from final accuracy alone. This report presents ChromaFlow, a tool-augmented autonomous reasoning framework built around planner-directed execution, specialized tool use, and telemetry-driven evaluation. We analyze ChromaFlow on GAIA 2023 Level-1 validation tasks under clean evaluation constraints. A frozen full Level-1 baseline achieved 29/53 correct answers, or 54.72%. A later recovery configuration with expanded orchestration achieved 27/53 correct answers, or 50.94%, while increasing tracebacks, timeout events, tool-failure mentions, token-log calls, and campaign-log cost estimates. Two randomized 20-task smoke evaluations produced 12/20 and 11/20 correct answers, showing that small diagnostic gains can be unstable across samples. The central result is therefore a negative ablation: more aggressive orchestration did not improve full-set performance and increased operational noise. A later strict-provider full-Level-1 diagnostic reached 30/53, or 56.60%, under explicit integrity controls, but at substantially higher token-log cost. The report argues that bounded planner escalation, deterministic extraction, evidence reconciliation, provider-health gates, and explicit run gates should be treated as first-order requirements for reliable autonomous agent evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14102
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChromaFlow: A Negative Ablation Study of Orchestration Overhead in Tool-Augmented Agent Evaluation
Mittal, Tarun
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.11; I.2.6
Autonomous language-model agents increasingly combine planning, tool use, document processing, browsing, code execution, and verification loops. These capabilities make agent systems more useful, but they also introduce operational failure modes that are not visible from final accuracy alone. This report presents ChromaFlow, a tool-augmented autonomous reasoning framework built around planner-directed execution, specialized tool use, and telemetry-driven evaluation. We analyze ChromaFlow on GAIA 2023 Level-1 validation tasks under clean evaluation constraints. A frozen full Level-1 baseline achieved 29/53 correct answers, or 54.72%. A later recovery configuration with expanded orchestration achieved 27/53 correct answers, or 50.94%, while increasing tracebacks, timeout events, tool-failure mentions, token-log calls, and campaign-log cost estimates. Two randomized 20-task smoke evaluations produced 12/20 and 11/20 correct answers, showing that small diagnostic gains can be unstable across samples. The central result is therefore a negative ablation: more aggressive orchestration did not improve full-set performance and increased operational noise. A later strict-provider full-Level-1 diagnostic reached 30/53, or 56.60%, under explicit integrity controls, but at substantially higher token-log cost. The report argues that bounded planner escalation, deterministic extraction, evidence reconciliation, provider-health gates, and explicit run gates should be treated as first-order requirements for reliable autonomous agent evaluation.
title ChromaFlow: A Negative Ablation Study of Orchestration Overhead in Tool-Augmented Agent Evaluation
topic Artificial Intelligence
I.2.11; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14102