Beyond Benchmark Islands: Toward Representative Trustworthiness Evaluation for Agentic AI

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating agentic AI trustworthiness across socio-technical scenarios, addressing current fragmentation and operationalizing trustworthiness properties.

Contribution

It defines a five-property trustworthiness profile and proposes the HAAF framework for scenario-based assessment and intervention, enabling generalizable improvements across diverse AI systems.

Findings

All 13 tested systems improved on the trustworthiness profile.

Two systems achieved a perfect risk-weighted profile.

The framework generalizes interventions without per-model tuning.

Abstract

Agentic AI systems increasingly act through tool-augmented, multi-step workflows whose failures (unsafe tool use, unauthorised actions, social harm) carry deployment-level consequences. Evaluation practice remains fragmented across isolated benchmark slices, and "trustworthiness" is frequently invoked but rarely defined operationally. We argue the central limitation is twofold: (i) the absence of a measurable specification of what agent trustworthiness means, and (ii) the lack of a principled notion of representativeness allowing assessment over a socio-technical scenario distribution rather than disconnected benchmark instances. We address (i) by defining agentic trustworthiness as a five-property profile (Reliability, Robustness, Safety, Social-Ethical Alignment, Operational Integrity) grounded in current AI risk frameworks, and (ii) with the Holographic Agent Assessment Framework (HAAF), which measures this profile over a scenario manifold through static policy analysis, sandbox simulation, social-ethical alignment assessment, and distribution-aware sampling, connected through an iterative Trustworthy Optimization Factory that converts red-team diagnoses into blue-team interventions. Our contributions are: (1) an operational five-property definition of agentic trustworthiness; (2) a distribution-aware scenario-sampling framework that surfaces property-level trade-offs invisible to scalar leaderboards; and (3) a cross-family transfer experiment in which interventions designed from a single focal model generalise -- without per-model or per-scenario tuning -- to 13 systems from seven model families (Llama, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, GPT, DeepSeek) on a 100-scenario suite, where all 13 systems improve and two reach a perfect risk-weighted profile, establishing HAAF's Factory as a model-agnostic deployment-readiness pipeline. Code: https://github.com/TonyQJH/haaf-pilot