Who Grades the Grader? Co-Evolving Evaluation Metrics and Skills for Self-Improving LLM Agents
Self-evolving agent systems create, revise, and retire their own skills, but every such loop assumes a reliable evaluation metric already exists. In many real applications none does. We show the metric itself can be the evolving object: our loop searches compositions of small typed drawback detectors under a full evolutionary lifecycle, selecting for agreement with a ten-item anchored reference set and regularizing by consensus over unlabeled outputs. What evolves is the function that grades one output, never the fixed task sets it is scored on, and what comes out is an inspectable expression rather than an opaque judge. It is also valid: on code generation it gains 0.21 agreement with hidden ground truth on a locked set that metric selection never reads (paired $p=0.014$), beating the bare LLM judge it contains. Validity is where safety lives: removing the anchor guards collapses the metric into a vacuous always-pass detector while removing the detector lifecycle does not, inverting the lesson from skill evolution. That collapse warns this line of work that downstream task score cannot validate a self-evolved evaluator, since the collapsed metric trains skills just as well. Task score answers only sufficiency, and an evolved metric suffices: \emph{Double Ratchet}, co-evolving the metric with a lifecycle-managed skill loop, retains 88--110\% of the lift ground truth or a hand-written rubric buys, across MBPP+, Spider~2.0-Snow, and report generation. When evolved skills gamed the report rubric, an independent judge caught it and one added detector repaired it.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Code GenerationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Methods for Ordinal Peer Grading
MOOCs have the potential to revolutionize higher education with their wide outreach and accessibility, but they require instructors to come up with scalable alternates to traditional student evaluation. Peer grading -- h…
Evaluating Complex Task through Crowdsourcing: Multiple Views Approach
With the popularity of massive open online courses, grading through crowdsourcing has become a prevalent approach towards large scale classes. However, for getting grades for complex tasks, which require specific skills …
Modeling speech emotion with label variance and analyzing performance across speakers and unseen acoustic conditions
Spontaneous speech emotion data usually contain perceptual grades where graders assign emotion score after listening to the speech files. Such perceptual grades introduce uncertainty in labels due to grader opinion varia…
Emotion RecognitionOverall - TestCrowdGrader: Crowdsourcing the Evaluation of Homework Assignments
Crowdsourcing offers a practical method for ranking and scoring large amounts of items. To investigate the algorithms and incentives that can be used in crowdsourcing quality evaluations, we built CrowdGrader, a tool tha…
The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents
A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below t…