TRACE Bench: Task-driven Roleplay Agentic Checklist Evaluation
arXiv:2608.11236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Roleplay evaluation should do more than assign a single score: it should reveal which role requirements were tested, which failed, and which dialogue evidence supports the judgment. We propose TRACE Bench, a task-driven agentic checklist evaluation framework. It decomposes each role profile offline into a fixed checklist, then uses a User Agent to converse naturally with the target roleplay model while privately updating checklist states from model responses. Scores therefore trace back to checklist items and supporting dialogue turns rather than a black-box holistic impression. For coverage cross-validation, we audit released M2 free-dialogue transcripts from the MiniMax Role-play Benchmark against the same role-derived checklist. The released free-chat transcripts cover only 73.74% of key role-profile points, whereas TRACE Bench reaches 99.91% coverage in fewer turns. Robustness experiments show stable rankings under repeated runs and User Agent replacement. Across 26 models, TRACE Bench reports overall rankings together with capability breakdowns and checklist traces. It also supports Closed-Loop Benchmark Evolution, distilling verification methods proven effective in failed traces so later evaluations can more reliably elicit and examine observed failure modes.
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[Submitted on 31 Jul 2026]
Title:TRACE Bench: Task-driven Roleplay Agentic Checklist Evaluation
View a PDF of the paper titled TRACE Bench: Task-driven Roleplay Agentic Checklist Evaluation, by Jiahui Zhang and 9 other authors
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Abstract:Roleplay evaluation should do more than assign a single score: it should reveal which role requirements were tested, which failed, and which dialogue evidence supports the judgment. We propose TRACE Bench, a task-driven agentic checklist evaluation framework. It decomposes each role profile offline into a fixed checklist, then uses a User Agent to converse naturally with the target roleplay model while privately updating checklist states from model responses. Scores therefore trace back to checklist items and supporting dialogue turns rather than a black-box holistic impression. For coverage cross-validation, we audit released M2 free-dialogue transcripts from the MiniMax Role-play Benchmark against the same role-derived checklist. The released free-chat transcripts cover only 73.74% of key role-profile points, whereas TRACE Bench reaches 99.91% coverage in fewer turns. Robustness experiments show stable rankings under repeated runs and User Agent replacement. Across 26 models, TRACE Bench reports overall rankings together with capability breakdowns and checklist traces. It also supports Closed-Loop Benchmark Evolution, distilling verification methods proven effective in failed traces so later evaluations can more reliably elicit and examine observed failure modes.
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Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.11236 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.11236v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.11236
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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From: Jiahui Zhang [view email] [v1] Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:35:59 UTC (2,449 KB)
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