Noise Floor Audit for Agent Benchmarks

Abstract

We audit measurement variability for 3 native tool-calling endpoints across 2 providers on the official BFCL multiple and parallel categories, using matched AST grading. At temperature 0, reruns are nearly deterministic across Groq endpoints and a thinking-enabled Gemini setting: ever-flip fractions are 0.7%, 2.0%, and 2.7%, with mean run correlations of 0.997, 0.966, and 0.961. Semantics-preserving prompt perturbations create the larger floor on all endpoints, with median perturbation paired SDs 11x to 58x larger than rerun paired SDs. The failure character also shifts: malformed-output failures account for 30%, 7%, and <1% of task failures, so marginal accuracy hides not only stability but also failure mode.

10 pages, 1 figure, 6 tables