arXiv · 2610.36510
Identity or Evidence? Auditing Evidence Dependence in Agentic Life-Science Benchmarks
Abstract
Agentic life-science benchmarks give an agent evidence about a named entity and score an answer against a recorded outcome. That score tests reasoning over evidence only if the evidence, rather than the name, determines the answer. We examine this distinction by varying identity and evidence independently on a clinical-outcome benchmark and published tasks from Biomni and LAB-Bench. Blinding identity matters little when a prompt contains a decisive sequence or passage. It matters a great deal when the prompt is mostly a name and candidate list (0.742 named versus 0.082 blinded; chance 0.093). Across 96 LAB-Bench LitQA2 questions, the gap increases under one fixed passage-redaction scheme (+0.000 to +0.135; per-instance slope +0.147, p= 0.004). On the clinical benchmark, a no-evidence recall probe matches prediction accuracy and recovers a database-specific programme count. So, we argue that benchmarks intended to measure evidence-dependent reasoning should report identity-blinded results, retrieval telemetry, and positive controls.
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Danai Brilli, Maria Georgila. 2026-10-27. Identity or Evidence? Auditing Evidence Dependence in Agentic Life-Science Benchmarks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36510
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