Testing-Driven Reliability Audit of Trajectory-Based Early Outcome Prediction for LLM Agents: Target-Specific Calibration Transfer Persists Within a Single Benchmark

Abstract:Predicting early outcomes based on trajectory can decrease the expenses associated with agent evaluation by terminating a run once the outcome becomes sufficiently predictable, assuming that the predictor's confidence is properly calibrated. Calibration is at risk when a predictor is applied to an agent on which it was never trained, but it is not known whether such transfer failures are broad across agent systems or concentrated in specific target agent/head combinations. Using public SWE-bench Verified trajectories and a frozen dual-head early-outcome prediction pipeline, we ran a leave-one-agent-out calibration audit, a shared-predictor leave-two-agents-out control, oracle prior correction, and a robustness battery over training cohorts, task resampling, task halves, jackknife, and thresholds. Fixed-scaffold TerminalBench analysis served as a pre-registered boundary test. Broad same-predictor pairwise heterogeneity was not supported; the median pairwise corrected-gap differences were 0.0180 (SUCCESS head, 45 pairs) and 0.0385 (FAILURE head, 35 pairs), and the pre-registered heterogeneity criterion was not met on either head. Two specific combinations, gpt-5-mini/SUCCESS and claude-opus-4.6/FAILURE, showed persistent calibration-transfer errors (median corrected gaps 0.1377 and 0.1107) without a sign reversal under any frozen control. TerminalBench did not establish cross-benchmark replication: the success target produced zero decisions (INDETERMINATE), and the failure target did not satisfy the pre-registered persistence criterion. Therefore, a strong target-specific calibration-transfer error can exist within one frozen environment, but the evidence does not establish that the error is intrinsic to the model or general across benchmarks.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.25647 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.25647v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.25647 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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