Stochasticity in Agentic Evaluations: Quantifying Inconsistency with Intraclass Correlation

AAAI 2026 Workshop TrustAgent Submission50 Authors

Keywords: agentic evaluation, intraclass correlation coefficient, evaluation reliability, LLM stochasticity, benchmark reproducibility, agent consistency, measurement science, trial-to-trial variance, evaluation stability, statistical testing, agent reliability, reasoning benchmarks, tool-use evaluation, evaluation design, reproducibility in AI

TL;DR: LLMs are stochastic; we use statistical methods to measure agent consistency and trust and enable practitioners to build reliable agentic systems beyond accuracy alone.

Abstract:

As large language models become components of larger agentic systems, evaluation reliability becomes critical: unreliable sub-agents introduce brittleness into downstream system behavior. Yet current evaluation practice, reporting a single accuracy number from a single run—obscures the variance underlying these results, making it impossible to distinguish genuine capability improvements from lucky sampling. We propose adopting Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC), a metric from measurement science, to characterize this variance. ICC decomposes observed variance into between-query variance (task difficulty) and within-query variance (agent inconsistency), revealing whether reported results reflect true capability or measurement noise. We evaluated on GAIA (Levels 1–3, measuring agentic capabilities across varying reasoning complexity) and FRAMES (measuring retrieval and factuality across multiple documents). We found that ICC varies dramatically with task structure, with reasoning and retrieval tasks (FRAMES) exhibit ICC=0.4955–0.7118 across models, and agentic tasks (GAIA) exhibiting ICC= 0.304-0.774 across models. For sub-agent replacement decisions in agentic systems, accuracy improvements are only trustworthy if ICC also improves. We demonstrate that ICC converges by n=8–16 trials for structured tasks and
for complex reasoning, enabling practitioners to set evidence-based resampling budgets. We recommend reporting accuracy alongside ICC and within-query variance as standard practice, and propose updated Evaluation Cards capturing these metrics. By making evaluation stability visible, we aim to transform agentic benchmarking from opaque leaderboard competition to principled experimental science. Our code is open-sourced at \url{ https://drive.google.com/file/d/16mski1pEl_ajmmbCiWZ_P_qKAciY5_0z/view?usp=sharing}. (Will be released to github upon acceptance to preserve anonymity.)

Submission Number: 50