Equation 26 · Why Cost and Latency Belong in the Evaluation Score, Not a Footnote
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Symbol k
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Start with how an agent handles its own failures. Suppose a task is retried up to k times under two different execution policies: sequential retry, where each attempt waits for the previous one to finish before starting, and parallel sampling, where all k attempts run concurrently and the first success is taken. Cost is roughly indifferent to which policy was used — the compute consumed scales with the number of attempts made, C(k) k , regardless of whether they ran one after another or all at once. Latency is not indifferent at all:
Sources cited in the article section
- [8] Identifying and Mitigating Systemic Measurement Bias in Production LLM Inference Benchmarks ↗
- [10] Towards Reproducible LLM Evaluation: Quantifying Uncertainty in LLM Benchmark Scores ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
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