CLApr 14

AlphaEval: Evaluating Agents in Production

arXiv:2604.1216299.01 citationsh-index: 15
Predicted impact top 2% in CL · last 90 daysOriginality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

For organizations deploying AI agents in production, AlphaEval offers a methodology to evaluate agent systems under realistic conditions, addressing the gap between curated benchmarks and production requirements.

AlphaEval introduces a production-grounded benchmark of 94 tasks from seven companies, evaluating complete AI agent products (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) across six O*NET domains. It reveals performance variations invisible to model-level evaluation and provides a framework for constructing production-grounded benchmarks.

The rapid deployment of AI agents in commercial settings has outpaced the development of evaluation methodologies that reflect production realities. Existing benchmarks measure agent capabilities through retrospectively curated tasks with well-specified requirements and deterministic metrics -- conditions that diverge fundamentally from production environments where requirements contain implicit constraints, inputs are heterogeneous multi-modal documents with information fragmented across sources, tasks demand undeclared domain expertise, outputs are long-horizon professional deliverables, and success is judged by domain experts whose standards evolve over time. We present AlphaEval, a production-grounded benchmark of 94 tasks sourced from seven companies deploying AI agents in their core business, spanning six O*NET (Occupational Information Network) domains. Unlike model-centric benchmarks, AlphaEval evaluates complete agent products -- Claude Code, Codex, etc. -- as commercial systems, capturing performance variations invisible to model-level evaluation. Our evaluation framework covers multiple paradigms (LLM-as-a-Judge, reference-driven metrics, formal verification, rubric-based assessment, automated UI testing, etc.), with individual domains composing multiple paradigms. Beyond the benchmark itself, we contribute a requirement-to-benchmark construction framework -- a systematic methodology that transforms authentic production requirements into executable evaluation tasks in minimal time. This framework standardizes the entire pipeline from requirement to evaluation, providing a reproducible, modular process that any organization can adopt to construct production-grounded benchmarks for their own domains.

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