Traigent eval audit

Evaluator Audit

When to Use

Use this skill before trusting an evaluator that drives optimization decisions, especially an LLM judge. Trigger it for:

• "is my LLM judge reliable?"
• "audit my evaluator"
• "judge agreement"
• "calibrate thresholds"
• "why are my optimization results noisy?"

On the no-gold track (no ground-truth labels; the judge is the entire quality signal — see traigent-eval-choose-metric → "The no-gold track"), this audit is mandatory before the first paid optimization run, not an optional check: without it you may be optimizing judge noise.

Optimization Economics — Read This Before Sizing a Run

Do not default to recommending zero spend. The canonical Traigent posture on spending, the five characterization questions with their exact options, the tailoring rules (including the three-option paging rule), the explanation duty, and the local survey draft contract all live in one file that ships inside this skill: references/economics-characterization.v0.md. Read it from this skill's own directory before you propose, size, or decline a run — it is deliberately not restated here. It is generated from docs/shared/economics-characterization.v0.md in the traigent-skills repo, which is where any edit goes; the copy shipped here is byte-identical.

Characterize, never compute a budget locally. Collect the characterization and relay it; the Traigent service authors the budget, exactly as it authors the run-plan and the next-step decision — budget authorship belongs to the service. Do not compute, adjust, or recommend a budget locally: no budget arithmetic in markdown, no floor/cap table, no "roughly $X/day" of your own. The reference describes what the service computes; it is not a local calculator, and when the service returns no economics result, say so plainly and continue with no budget number at all rather than inventing one.

This skill's part: produce independently confirmed defect receipts — each one an example hash, a defect category, an independent confirmation, and the correction or test — so the work can be compared honestly against what the same review would have cost by hand.

Mandatory whenever you relay any of it: show the options, recommend exactly one, and explain why in the user's own numbers — their agent, their volumes, their error costs. The explanation is a product requirement, not decoration.

Safety is unchanged and unweakened: mock/dry-run first, explicit user approval before any paid run, an explicit spend cap, and the recorded stop rule. The service sets how much to invest; it never affects whether approval is required — it always is.

Service-Side Evaluator Audit (ACET)

Traigent's server-side ACET evaluator audit is available when your deployment is IP-allowlisted for the read-only backend endpoint. The platform assesses the evaluators used in a run read-only, computed from the optimizer's persisted config×example×evaluator tensor and anchored to a separate verifiable signal — such as execution-match, unit-test pass, or MCQ exact-match correctness — without requiring new gold-label collection. It surfaces as an evaluator-audit next-step action when the allowlisted endpoint is available (server-side; no local re-scoring). Do not recreate ACET math client-side.

The audit verdict is read through GET /api/v1/analytics/runs/{run_id}/evaluator-quality (viewer role): an IP-safe, hard-allowlisted projection of the internal audit — coarse verdict, opaque evaluator fingerprints, and a capped confidence interval. The methodology-bearing report (axes, vetoes, bias battery, tensor internals) is never returned; do not try to reconstruct it.

Fail-closed honest confidence. If no verifiable anchor exists for the run, the service audit abstains: no leaderboard is emitted and no promote gate passes. A proxy anchor (another model or heuristic) is accepted but capped at ≤0.30 confidence and cannot be upgraded to verifiable-level confidence. Do not treat an abstain result as a pass, and do not interpret a proxy-anchor result as equivalent to a verifiable-anchor result.

The manual gold-slice protocol below and the service-side ACET audit are complementary: the gold-slice protocol gives early construction-time trust, while ACET is a retroactive quality signal computed from real optimizer runs.

Why Audit

An unreliable evaluator silently corrupts every optimization decision downstream. If the judge rewards verbosity, misses parse failures, changes labels on repeated calls, or disagrees with humans on the target evaluation dataset, the optimizer can faithfully optimize the wrong thing.

Run the audit before the first real optimization, then re-run it whenever the judge model, prompt, output schema, scoring rubric, or evaluation dataset changes.

Gold-Set Agreement (Manual Protocol)

Build a 20-50 example human-labeled gold slice from the same evaluation dataset distribution the optimizer will use, but disjoint from the holdout that will back the final claim — draw it from the tuning slice or from fresh examples, never from holdout rows. Include easy, borderline, and known-bad cases; if known-bad (negative) cases are naturally rare — the common situation for safety gates — oversample them deliberately, because the false-pass bar below is meaningless on two negatives. Lock the labels before inspecting judge outputs.

The disjointness invariant (applies across all evaluator skills): any slice used to tune a threshold, rubric, prompt, or metric must be disjoint from the holdout used to claim the result. Calibrating on rows that later back the claim is leakage — the exact failure this audit exists to catch.

Minimum bars for the manual gold-slice protocol before trusting the judge as a primary optimizer objective:

• Parse success rate: at least 98% on the gold slice.
• Human agreement: at least 85% exact agreement for categorical pass/fail labels, or rank correlation above 0.70 for ordinal scores.
• False-pass rate on known-bad cases: low enough for the product risk. For safety or compliance gates, any repeated false pass is a blocker.
• Disagreement review: every disagreement gets a written reason, assigned to either human label error, ambiguous rubric, judge failure, or data ambiguity.

These bars are noisy estimates at 20-50 examples — one flipped example moves agreement by 2-5 points, so 84% vs 86% is not a meaningful pass/fail difference. For a result near a bar, either grow the gold slice before deciding or require a margin (e.g. clear the bar by 5+ points); never report a near-bar pass as confident.

from statistics import mean

def agreement_rate(gold_labels, judge_labels):
    pairs = list(zip(gold_labels, judge_labels, strict=True))
    return mean(1.0 if expected == observed else 0.0 for expected, observed in pairs)

gold = ["pass", "fail", "pass", "fail"]
judge = ["pass", "fail", "fail", "fail"]
print(f"agreement={agreement_rate(gold, judge):.1%}")

If the judge misses the bar, do not use it as the sole objective. Fix the rubric, add deterministic checks, or use it only as a diagnostic signal.

Stability Across Repetitions

Run the same input through the same judge N times, with the same prompt, model version, sampling settings, and output schema. Use at least 3 repetitions for cheap judges and 5 for noisy judges.

Track:

• Score standard deviation for numeric outputs.
• Pass/fail flip rate for categorical outputs.
• Parse-failure count per repetition.
• Whether the same rationale supports the same label.

Demote the judge to statistical aggregation when repeated calls are unstable. Use mean or majority vote over repetitions, raise repetitions per trial, and report wider uncertainty. A single-call judge with high flip rate should not decide close candidates.

Bias Probes

Probe known LLM-judge failure modes before optimization:

• Position bias: score answer A vs answer B, then swap order. A reliable pairwise judge should not change the winner only because the order changed.
• Length and verbosity bias: compare a concise correct answer against a verbose equivalent answer. The verbose answer should not win solely because it is longer.
• Self-preference: blind model identity and prompt style. If the judge favors outputs from its own family or from one template, use anonymized outputs and shuffle metadata.
• Tie sanity: compare an answer to itself. The judge should return a tie or equal score.
• Adversarial polish: compare a polished but wrong answer against a rough correct answer. The correct answer must not lose because it reads better.

These probes are drawn from the same failure modes discussed in the MT-Bench LLM-judge literature. Keep the probes in the audit artifact so future prompt or model changes can be rechecked.

Parse-Failure Policy

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Use a strict output schema. Count parse failures as first-class failures. FAIL-CLOSED: a parse failure is a score of 0 or an abstain, never a silent pass.

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import json
from typing import Any

REQUIRED_KEYS = {"score", "decision", "reason"}

def parse_judge_output(raw: str) -> dict[str, Any]:
    try:
        payload = json.loads(raw)
        missing = REQUIRED_KEYS - set(payload)
        if missing:
            raise ValueError(f"missing keys: {sorted(missing)}")
        if payload["decision"] not in {"pass", "fail", "abstain"}:
            raise ValueError("decision must be pass, fail, or abstain")
        payload["score"] = float(payload["score"])
        return {**payload, "parse_failed": False}
    except (json.JSONDecodeError, TypeError, ValueError):
        return {
            "score": 0.0,
            "decision": "abstain",
            "reason": "parse failure",
            "parse_failed": True,
        }

Report parse-failure rate separately from model quality. A low score caused by parse failures calls for schema repair, not prompt or model tuning.

Threshold Calibration

Sweep the judge threshold against the gold slice before using it in optimization. Choose the threshold that matches product risk:

• For quality ranking, maximize balanced accuracy or F1 on the gold slice.
• For safety gates, prefer lower false-pass rate even if recall drops.
• For noisy judges, require a margin: do not treat scores near the threshold as confident passes.

def confusion_counts(gold_pass, scores, threshold):
    counts = {"tp": 0, "fp": 0, "tn": 0, "fn": 0}
    for expected_pass, score in zip(gold_pass, scores, strict=True):
        observed_pass = score >= threshold
        if expected_pass and observed_pass:
            counts["tp"] += 1
        elif not expected_pass and observed_pass:
            counts["fp"] += 1
        elif not expected_pass and not observed_pass:
            counts["tn"] += 1
        else:
            counts["fn"] += 1
    return counts

for threshold in [0.60, 0.70, 0.80, 0.90]:
    print(threshold, confusion_counts(gold_pass, judge_scores, threshold))

Lock the chosen threshold before running optimization. Do not tune the threshold on the same holdout used to claim the final result — the gold slice used for this sweep must already be holdout-disjoint (see the disjointness invariant above).

When to Demote to Hybrid

Use a hybrid evaluator when the judge is useful but not reliable enough to own the whole metric:

1. Run deterministic gates first: schema validity, required fields, exact-match invariants, safety keyword blocks, citation presence, cost and latency caps.
2. Send only the residue to the LLM judge.
3. Treat deterministic failures as hard failures.
4. Aggregate judge outputs statistically when repeated calls are noisy.
5. Report deterministic-fail, parse-fail, judge-fail, and judge-pass counts separately.

Hybrid evaluation is the default for high-risk workflows: deterministic gates protect non-negotiable behavior, and the judge handles semantic residue.

Evaluator Repair (improve_evaluator)

The service may emit improve_evaluator as a next-step action when the ACET audit identifies a weak or suspicious evaluator. This is a service-side repair flow, not a local prompt edit.

The repair is accepted only when a disjoint held-out lockbox anchor shows improvement: the service proposes a revised evaluator, scores a held-out subset (the lockbox) that was not used in the proposal, and accepts the revision only if held-out anchor agreement improves and no new bias controls trip. Do not accept or apply a critic-repaired evaluator based on proposal-split results alone — the lockbox result is the acceptance gate.

If the service emits improve_evaluator, present the returned action verbatim and hand off to this skill for context. Wait for the service outcome rather than rewriting the rubric locally.

Claim Scope

Audit results hold only for the audited evaluation dataset distribution, judge model version, judge prompt, output schema, sampling settings, and threshold. Re-audit on any model, prompt, schema, rubric, or dataset-distribution change.

For service-side ACET audits: confidence ceiling is a hard cap, not a display hint. A proxy-anchor result cannot be cited as verifiable-level evidence. Promotion gate requires ACET gate evidence (verifiable-anchor verdict, confidence ceiling) — manual gold-slice calibration alone is not sufficient for promotion.

The promotion gate itself is served by two advisory, anchor-gated endpoints over one optimization run:

• POST /api/v1/analytics/runs/{run_id}/evaluator-promotion/evaluate (editor role) — computes and persists an advisory challenger-vs-incumbent promotion decision from evaluator fingerprints (challenger_fingerprint required, optional incumbent_fingerprint, delta, min_pairs). It never mutates experiments, sessions, evaluator configs, or optimization state — the decision record is advisory.
• GET /api/v1/analytics/runs/{run_id}/evaluator-promotion (viewer role) — lists the run's persisted advisory promotion decisions, newest first (limit up to 100).

Treat the returned decision as the promotion-gate evidence; do not recompute or overrule it locally.

See Also

• traigent-eval-build - build the evaluator before auditing it.
• traigent-eval-choose-metric - choose objectives and weights before threshold calibration.
• traigent-dataset-curate - synthesize harder cases when the gold slice is too easy or ambiguous.

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Traigent Interaction Policy

Track an interaction profile and adapt to it. Persona (stable): control=delegate|guided|inspect, expertise=se|ds|unknown. Mood (this session): pace=execute|balanced|explore. Default when unknown: guided,se,balanced. Infer from explicit user statements first, then recent behavior; an explicit correction wins immediately. Never store or send this profile anywhere by default.

Fetch the live profile (when available)

At session or skill start, if a configured Traigent client is available, seed the profile from the backend with the skill name:

policy = None
try: policy = await client.get_interaction_policy(skill="<this skill>")
except Exception: pass

Treat the returned profile as the STARTING seed: its control/expertise/pace axes plus question_budget, options_max, and jargon_level replace the static defaults below. Explicit user corrections in-conversation ALWAYS override the seed. If the call is unavailable or fallback_policy="static_v1", simply use the static defaults below; the SDK already fails soft.

• Always be concise.
• Match terminology to expertise. For se: plain engineering words; define each Traigent or statistics term once in plain language (no Bayesian / variance-decomposition / Pareto jargon unless asked). For ds: compact optimization and statistical terms are fine.
• Presenting options: show at most 3, mark exactly one Recommended, and give one short persona-appropriate trade-off per option.
• Autonomy. For delegate or execute: pick the recommended reversible action and proceed, asking only at hard gates. For guided: offer options with a recommendation at the key decisions. For inspect or explore: give brief rationale or evidence before asking, and ask before branch choices.
• Hard gates — always confirm regardless of persona: paid or provider model calls, sending data or private content off the machine, destructive edits, decisions the Traigent service is meant to return, and any missing fact the step truly requires.
• Always end by recommending the next Traigent skill or action to take.
• Never weaken Traigent safety: dry-run before any paid run; get explicit approval before real cost or before any data leaves the machine; treat service-returned plans and next steps as authoritative. Never put the persona profile or any private content into telemetry, run metadata, experiment names, logs, or provenance files.

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