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AV-AIVAT: 74x Cheaper Agent Evaluation with Certified Anytime-Valid Stopping in Imperfect-Information Games

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TL;DR - An arXiv preprint combining AIVAT variance reduction with anytime-valid confidence sequences so head-to-head agent evaluations in imperfect-information games can stop as soon as evidence suffices, cutting required hands by a median 74x. It matters because benchmarking LLM agents is expensive, and naive early stopping silently breaks stated confidence levels.

  • AIVAT's conditional mean-zero corrections cut variance by a median 54x across 15 LLM agent configurations over 71,439 paired Heads-Up No-Limit Hold'em hands, but provides no stopping rule on its own.
  • AV-AIVAT pairs those corrections with continuously monitored confidence sequences; the online value model trains only on past games so no hand scores its own correction, preserving validity under optional stopping.
  • At 95% nominal level and ±1 Big Blind precision, raw outcomes need a median 74x more hands than AIVAT-corrected ones under the Asymptotic CS (AsympCS).
  • Exact finite-sample certification uses the Empirical-Bernstein CS, requiring an independently justified payoff bound (established structurally for Leduc hold'em); a width floor from the bet cap and bound limits gains, with a median 1.37x stopping-time ratio in descriptive HUNL runs.

Sources (1)

AV-AIVAT: 74x Cheaper Agent Evaluation with Certified Anytime-Valid Stopping in Imperfect-Information Games

arXiv cs.GT Boning Li, Yu Chen, Longbo Huang 2026-08-06 arXiv:2608.06362
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 1 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 1 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-30 14:22:41.662353 UTC

TL;DR - An arXiv preprint combining AIVAT variance reduction with anytime-valid confidence sequences so head-to-head agent evaluations in imperfect-information games can stop as soon as evidence suffices, cutting required hands by a median 74x. It matters because benchmarking LLM agents is expensive, and naive early stopping silently breaks stated confidence levels.

  • AIVAT's conditional mean-zero corrections cut variance by a median 54x across 15 LLM agent configurations over 71,439 paired Heads-Up No-Limit Hold'em hands, but provides no stopping rule on its own.
  • AV-AIVAT pairs those corrections with continuously monitored confidence sequences; the online value model trains only on past games so no hand scores its own correction, preserving validity under optional stopping.
  • At 95% nominal level and ±1 Big Blind precision, raw outcomes need a median 74x more hands than AIVAT-corrected ones under the Asymptotic CS (AsympCS).
  • Exact finite-sample certification uses the Empirical-Bernstein CS, requiring an independently justified payoff bound (established structurally for Leduc hold'em); a width floor from the bet cap and bound limits gains, with a median 1.37x stopping-time ratio in descriptive HUNL runs.
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