arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Noise Floor Audit for Agent Benchmarks

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2608.22331 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 Aug 2026]

Title:Noise Floor Audit for Agent Benchmarks

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Abstract:We audit measurement variability for 3 native tool-calling endpoints across 2 providers on the official BFCL multiple and parallel categories, using matched AST grading. At temperature 0, reruns are nearly deterministic across Groq endpoints and a thinking-enabled Gemini setting: ever-flip fractions are 0.7%, 2.0%, and 2.7%, with mean run correlations of 0.997, 0.966, and 0.961. Semantics-preserving prompt perturbations create the larger floor on all endpoints, with median perturbation paired SDs 11x to 58x larger than rerun paired SDs. The failure character also shifts: malformed-output failures account for 30%, 7%, and <1% of task failures, so marginal accuracy hides not only stability but also failure mode.
Comments: 10 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.22331 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2608.22331v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22331
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yihang Chen [view email]
[v1] Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:00:11 UTC (35 KB)
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