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Equation 10 · Part 3 · How Benchmark Contamination Actually Works in Agentic Evaluation

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passk≈pk\text{pass}^k \approx p^k
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What this part means

Approximately equal to; the equality is not exact.

Its job in the formula

Approximately equal to; the equality is not exact.

The passage around this formula

averaged over tasks to produce the benchmark’s headline number. The metric is designed to punish an agent whose competence is real but inconsistent across resampled trials — a stochastic policy with true per-trial success probability p has passk\text{pass}^k ≈\approx pkp^k , which falls quickly as k grows. But a policy whose output on a given task is deterministic — an empty response, always, regardless of sampling — produces the identical transcript on every trial, so

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A variable is a named place for a value. Its letter is a local label: x can mean position in one formula and a data point in another.

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Sources cited in the article section

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