NeuroState-Bench: A Human-Calibrated Benchmark for Commitment Integrity in LLM Agent Profiles

TL;DR

NeuroState-Bench introduces a human-calibrated benchmark for assessing commitment integrity in LLM agent profiles, revealing divergence from task success and providing a more stable evaluation of commitment failures.

Contribution

It provides a novel, human-calibrated benchmark with side-query probes to operationalize and evaluate commitment integrity in LLM agents across diverse tasks.

Findings

Task success and commitment integrity often diverge.

Integrity rankings are more stable under distractor perturbation.

HCCIS-CORE effectively discriminates terminal task failure.

Abstract

Outcome-only evaluation under-specifies whether an evaluated agent profile preserves the commitments required to solve a multi-turn task coherently. NeuroState-Bench is a human-calibrated benchmark that operationalizes commitment integrity through benchmark-defined side-query probes rather than inferred hidden activations. The released inventory contains 144 deterministic tasks and 306 benchmark-defined side-query probes spanning eight cognitively motivated failure families, paired clean and distractor variants, and three difficulty bands. The main 32-profile evaluation contains a fixed 16-profile local subset and a matched 16-profile hosted large-model subset evaluated through the same benchmark pipeline. Human calibration uses the final merged reporting scope: 104 sampled task units, 216 raw annotations, and 108 adjudicated task rows, with weighted kappa = 0.977 and ICC(2,1) = 0.977. Empirically, task success and commitment integrity diverge across this expanded grid: the success leader is not the integrity leader, 31 of 32 profiles change rank when integrity replaces task success, and integrity rankings are more stable under distractor perturbation. The primary confidence-free score HCCIS-CORE reaches 0.8469 AUC and 0.6992 PR-AUC for post-probe diagnostic discrimination of terminal task failure; the legacy full heuristic variant HCCIS-FULL reaches 0.7997 AUC and 0.6410 PR-AUC. Probe accuracy and state drift achieve slightly higher ROC-AUC, 0.8587, and better Brier/ECE, while HCCIS-CORE has substantially higher point-estimate PR-AUC and remains more closely tied to the benchmark's intended construct. The exploratory neural-augmented variant HCCIS+N is weaker overall, and a randomized subspace control approaches chance. NeuroState-Bench therefore contributes a calibrated evaluation axis for exposing commitment failures over a broader model grid than the original local-only subset.