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QuoteBench: Matched Scores Can Hide Command-Path Failures (arxiv.org)
3 points by ninadwrites 49 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A test checks whether agents' Bash commands survive the interface that wraps and re-reads them before the shell, on 56 tasks with end-state checks. Passing those replies through it cut success by 55 to 73 points, though warning the model recovered much of it.

Abstract · QuoteBench: How Matched Scores Can Hide Command-Path Failures

LLM coding agents issue Bash commands through interfaces that may serialize, wrap, and reparse model output. Matched execution scores alone cannot distinguish command-generation errors from failures introduced after generation. QuoteBench measures this boundary with exact final-state validation on 56 one-shot tasks from 14 incident-derived families, crossing the generation contract with the execution transport around one deliberately unescaped added parser. Escaping at the interpolation point reproduces each replayed reply's raw-path outcome, so any recovery under a disclosed boundary must come from the model changing its generation. Across eight same-window configurations, replaying the same reply through the added parser lowers success by 55.4 to 73.2 percentage points; disclosure recovers 30.4 to 60.7 points for six configurations, and zero or slightly negative for the other two. Raw generation is nearly saturated at the frontier; boundary adaptation is what still separates models. GPT-5.6-sol's matched gap of -3.6 points hides -64.3 points of damage and +60.7 points of compensation. The deployment configuration reorders models: one reversal among 26 comparable pairs is unambiguous and four more sit on single-task margins. Evaluations of command-issuing agents should report the model configuration, generation contract, execution path, operating point, and final-state validator rather than treat a matched score as an intrinsic model property.

Shangao Li, Yao Zhang, Volker Tresp, Yuanyuan Yang
arXiv:2608.13547 · cs.AI, cs.SE · submitted Aug 13, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 29 pages, 5 figures. Project page: https://quotebench.lsamc.website/

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