S. Su
Publications
A Unified Framework for the Evaluation of LLM Agentic Capabilities
As LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents, reliable assessment of their agentic capabilities has become essential. However, reported benchmark scores often jointly reflect model capability and the implementation choices each benchmark is packaged with, making cross-benchmark results difficult to interpret as clean measurements of the underlying model. In this work, we present a unified framework for the fair evaluation of LLM agentic capabilities. Driven by a unified configuration system, the framework integrates diverse benchmarks into a standardized instruction--tool--environment format, executes agents through a fixed ReAct-style architecture within a controllable sandbox, and provides an optional offline setting that replaces volatile live environments with curated snapshots, so that framework effects and environment effects can be analyzed separately. Building on this, we unify the evaluation methodology under each benchmark's original task-success criteria, while introducing unified metrics for resource consumption and a taxonomy for decision- and execution-level failure attribution. Within this framework, we adapt 7 widely used benchmarks spanning 24 domains across single-agent, multi-agent, and safety-critical scenarios, and conduct a large-scale empirical analysis over 400K rollouts and 5B tokens on 15 models. The results show that scaffold choice and environmental volatility materially shift benchmark outcomes in both directions, allowing our framework to disentangle intrinsic LLM capabilities from framework- and environment-induced artifacts. We further demonstrate its extensibility as a secure testbed for safety-critical domains. Codes and benchmarks at are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/A-Unified-Framework-for-the-Evaluation-of-LLM-Agentic-Capabilities, https://huggingface.co/AgentFramework/Unified_Farmework.
Resource Consumption Threats in Large Language Models
Given limited and costly computational infrastructure, resource efficiency is a key requirement for large language models (LLMs). Efficient LLMs increase service capacity for providers and reduce latency and API costs for users. Recent resource consumption threats induce excessive generation, degrading model efficiency and harming both service availability and economic sustainability. This survey presents a systematic review of threats to resource consumption in LLMs. We further establish a unified view of this emerging area by clarifying its scope and examining the problem along the full pipeline from threat induction to mechanism understanding and mitigation. Our goal is to clarify the problem landscape for this emerging area, thereby providing a clearer foundation for characterization and mitigation.
From Helpfulness to Toxic Proactivity: Diagnosing Behavioral Misalignment in LLM Agents
The enhanced capabilities of LLM-based agents come with an emergency for model planning and tool-use abilities. Attributing to helpful-harmless trade-off from LLM alignment, agents typically also inherit the flaw of "over-refusal", which is a passive failure mode. However, the proactive planning and action capabilities of agents introduce another crucial danger on the other side of the trade-off. This phenomenon we term "Toxic Proactivity'': an active failure mode in which an agent, driven by the optimization for Machiavellian helpfulness, disregards ethical constraints to maximize utility. Unlike over-refusal, Toxic Proactivity manifests as the agent taking excessive or manipulative measures to ensure its "usefulness'' is maintained. Existing research pays little attention to identifying this behavior, as it often lacks the subtle context required for such strategies to unfold. To reveal this risk, we introduce a novel evaluation framework based on dilemma-driven interactions between dual models, enabling the simulation and analysis of agent behavior over multi-step behavioral trajectories. Through extensive experiments with mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate that Toxic Proactivity is a widespread behavioral phenomenon and reveal two major tendencies. We further present a systematic benchmark for evaluating Toxic Proactive behavior across contextual settings.
"LLM Agent Performance" Is Not a Single Evaluation Target
LLM agent benchmark scores are shaped not only by the model but also by the agent harness, environment, evaluator, and inference budget. Unified execution controls these non-model factors by evaluating candidate models under the same configuration, making observed differences more attributable to the models themselves. However, model comparison is only one use of agent benchmarks. Other evaluations compare complete agent systems or test whether a fixed model or system remains stable across predeclared changes in its operating conditions. These results can all be reported under the common label of "LLM agent performance." Our position is that "LLM agent performance" does not denote a single evaluation target. Model comparisons under a reference stack and comparisons of complete agent systems answer different questions, while robustness asks whether either conclusion persists across predeclared conditions. The claim supported by a score therefore depends on the declared candidate boundary and condition policy. We derive implications for leaderboards, result reporting, and benchmark versioning, showing how distinguishing these classes preserves fair comparison while accommodating system innovation and robustness analysis.