Equation 12 · Part 1 · How Benchmark Contamination Actually Works in Agentic Evaluation
Symbol k_deterministic
What this part means
eterministic is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Its job in the formula
eterministic is part of the quantity the equation computes from the expression on the right.
Full expression→Symbol k_deterministic→Article meaning
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 , 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 . A degenerate exploit is not merely invisible to pass@1; it is more invisible to pas, precisely because pas was built to reward consistency, and a fixed, checker-satisfying non-answer is the most consistent…
Learn the underlying idea
A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.
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Sources cited in the article section
- [8] Establishing Best Practices for Building Rigorous Agentic Benchmarks ↗
- [7] τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains ↗
- [9] Saving SWE-Bench: A Benchmark Mutation Approach for Realistic Agent Evaluation ↗
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.