Backend
Finding Blind Spots in AppWorld and WorkArena Task Verifiers
arXiv cs.SE0 views
arXiv:2610.09142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Execution-based task verifiers decide whether an agent succeeded. We audit shipped AppWorld and WorkArena verifiers with source-informed mutation tests. The main audit never modifies a shipped checker. In AppWorld, duplicating a non-idempotent write creates an extra record while preserving every checked field value. The verifier accepts all three task variants from two of five eligible generators: 6/15 constructed effects. A cardinality patch applied to checker copies after the census makes all six cells fail while preserving valid controls. In WorkArena, we prospectively rerun 23 extra-field candidates selected for earlier checker-PASS outcomes. Independent Table API readback confirms nondefault persisted values in 21, while all 23 receive PASS. Two requested strings are aliases of stored defaults. The 21 confirmed wrong effects span three form templates. These selected cases confirm wrong effects under the audit's protocol; they do not estimate a population rate. No other construction produces an independently confirmed false accept. Other checker-PASS cases are effect-correct degeneracies. We report zero-PASS families separately because retained evidence differs. In fixed intent-swap grids, the checkers return no PASS on 2,689 off-diagonal executions. This is a rejection census: 57 WorkArena cells use session-scoped evidence; the other 2,632 lack classified rejection causes and independent target ground truth. Each increment is specified before its own cells are scored. A supplement accompanies the OpenReview submission with the construction grammar, evidence, content-bound stage lineage and count reproducer.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09142PreviousHow Fragile Is On-Device Language Model Safety? Localizing Safety-Critical Parameters for Sparse Fault AnalysisNextSpecGuard: Proving a Task Is Broken Before the Agent Cheats
Related posts
A Four-Line Fix for a 9.8: Anatomy of Linux's TCP Handshake Use-After-Free
0dev.to
The Building Is a System: What Software Engineers Can Learn from Construction Site Failures
0dev.to

Part 4: When the Screen Changes Silently: Live Regions, Headings and Focus in Compose
0dev.to
FlatCake: Why Tiered KV Cache Storage Is Holding LLM Serving Back
0dev.to
Why Scrum is Not a Silver Bullet: 5 Structural Drawbacks and Fixes
0dev.to
Agentic Frameworks Compared: LangGraph, CrewAI & More
0dev.to