PQR: A Framework to Generate Diverse and Realistic User Queries that Elicit QA Agent Failures
Authors: Yunan Lu, Luigi Liu, Omar Yahia et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 16551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM-based agents remains challenging because identifying meaningful failure cases often requires substantial human effort to design realistic test scenarios.
Relevance
Read next because PQR: A Framework to Generate Diverse and Realistic User Queries that Elicit QA Agent Failures overlaps with clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "The marker is a representational handle, not a behavioural one — sharing it between a villain persona and the assistant transfers no misalignment (HIGH confidence)". Matching terms: latin, eval, rate, compare, test. Source: arxiv cs.CL (NLP).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)": this item discusses failure, failures, adversarial.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.16551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM-based agents remains challenging because identifying meaningful failure cases often requires substantial human effort to design realistic test scenarios. Prior works primarily focus on automatically discovering agent failures induced by adversarial users, while overlooking queries with real user intents that also trigger agent failures. We introduce PQR, a framework that not only surfaces agent failures with respect to specific objectives (e.g., helpfulness, safety, etc.) but also resembles real users' intents. PQR operates through an iterative interaction between two complementary modules. The query refinement module performs rewrites to explore diverse query variations, while the prompt refinement module uses prior feedback to derive new objective-violating strategies and realism policies for refining prompts, which in turn generate failure-triggering yet realistic queries. We evaluate PQR on detecting an e-commerce QA agent's unhelpful responses. Our method uncovers 23% - 78% more unhelpful responses, and our generated queries are more diverse and realistic compared to previous methods.