Baskar Ganapathy

📢 New paper: Emerging Trends in AI Agent Evaluation Evals are central to how we measure AI progress. This was pretty easy when we just evaluated ML models, but agents add lots of complexity. To establish a shared foundation, we surveyed 33 eval trends: sage.cs.princeton.edu/trends… We center our paper around three main questions: 1️⃣ How should we evaluate? At its core, evaluation asks whether a score means what we think it means. Ensuring validity of these scores gets much harder with agents as their results depend not only on the model but on the scaffold, tools, and environment. We discuss issues on validity, statistical rigor, causal attribution, and contamination, along with the emerging toolkit (LLM judges, log analysis, dynamic benchmarks, shared infrastructure) and newer formats like red-teaming and open-world evaluations. 2️⃣ What do we evaluate? Evaluation is increasingly moving from synthetic environment and well-scoped benchmarks to realistic deployment scenarios. Beyond what an agent can do on its own, we look at how agents work with people (from simulated users to field experiments and real-world usage data), domain-specific and broader economic impact, dangerous capabilities, security incidents, interaction harms, and effects on organizations and institutions. 3️⃣ Who evaluates? With agents, evaluators make many consequential choices (such as scaffolds, tools, and budgets). Those choices have a large degree of influence on developers, policymakers, and the general public. We examine what evaluator independence requires, how lab access and funding shape the field, how the rising costs of evaluating frontier AI systems narrow who can evaluate, and where other disciplines outside of AI/ML can contribute to strengthen and improve the evals landscape. We hope that this paper is a useful resource for researchers (whether new to or already familiar with agent evaluation), as well as policymakers, educators, and anyone building, deploying, or funding evaluations! Joint work with @flxcn, @PKirgis, @nityndg, @RishiBommasani, @DubMagda , @EllaTabassi, @CUdudec, @AnkaReuel, @sanmikoyejo, @sayashk, and @random_walker!