Researcher profile

David Pape

David Pape contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

No More, No Less: Task Alignment in Terminal Agents

Terminal agents are increasingly capable of executing complex, long-horizon tasks autonomously from a single user prompt. To do so, they must interpret instructions encountered in the environment (e.g., README files, code comments, stack traces) and determine their relevance to the task. This creates a fundamental challenge: relevant cues must be followed to complete a task, whereas irrelevant or misleading ones must be ignored. Existing benchmarks do not capture this ability. An agent may appear capable by blindly following all instructions, or appear robust by ignoring them altogether. We introduce TAB (Task Alignment Benchmark), a suite of 89 terminal tasks derived from Terminal-Bench 2.1. Each task is intentionally underspecified, with missing information provided as a necessary cue embedded in a natural environmental artifact, alongside a plausible but irrelevant distractor. Solving these tasks requires selectively using the cue while ignoring the distractor. Applying TAB to ten frontier agents reveals a systematic gap between task capability and task alignment. The strongest Terminal-Bench agent achieves high task completion but low task alignment on TAB. Evaluating six prompt-injection defenses further shows that suppressing distractor execution also suppresses the cues required for task completion. These results demonstrate that task-aligned agents require selective use of environmental instructions rather than blanket acceptance or rejection.

preprint2026arXiv

The Silent Hyperparameter: Quantifying the Impact of Inference Backends on LLM Reproducibility

Progress in LLMs is increasingly measured through standardized benchmarks, where state-of-the-art improvements are often separated by fractions of a percentage point. At the same time, the computational cost of evaluating modern LLMs has driven widespread adoption of specialized inference backends, software systems that execute trained models efficiently at inference time. While critical for scalability, system-level optimizations, such as custom CUDA kernels and reduced-precision arithmetic, can alter token probabilities and introduce non-determinism, possibly cascading into divergent generation. In this work, we first survey the inference landscape, identifying 200 distinct engines, and analyze 35,000 ML publications, finding that the specific inference stack is rarely reported despite this widespread diversity. We then present a systematic empirical study of how inference backends affect LLM benchmark results. Holding model weights, decoding parameters, and hardware constant, we evaluate five widely used inference engines, including vLLM, SGLang, and llama.cpp, across multiple open-weight models and established benchmarks. We show that the choice of backend alone can shift benchmark scores by up to 16.6 percentage points and induce high rates of output disagreement. By isolating backend optimizations and tracing the execution pipeline, we find this divergence is driven by system-level optimizations like prefix caching and CUDA graphs, custom kernels, and engine-specific defaults in logit processing. Our findings identify the inference backend as a previously unreported but consequential hyperparameter in the evaluation of LLM and advocate standardized reporting of inference stacks to improve the reproducibility and interpretability of benchmark comparisons.

preprint2022arXiv

Generating Simple Directed Social Network Graphs for Information Spreading

Online social networks are a dominant medium in everyday life to stay in contact with friends and to share information. In Twitter, users can connect with other users by following them, who in turn can follow back. In recent years, researchers studied several properties of social networks and designed random graph models to describe them. Many of these approaches either focus on the generation of undirected graphs or on the creation of directed graphs without modeling the dependencies between reciprocal (i.e., two directed edges of opposite direction between two nodes) and directed edges. We propose an approach to generate directed social network graphs that creates reciprocal and directed edges and considers the correlation between the respective degree sequences. Our model relies on crawled directed graphs in Twitter, on which information w.r.t. a topic is exchanged or disseminated. While these graphs exhibit a high clustering coefficient and small average distances between random node pairs (which is typical in real-world networks), their degree sequences seem to follow a $χ^2$-distribution rather than power law. To achieve high clustering coefficients, we apply an edge rewiring procedure that preserves the node degrees. We compare the crawled and the created graphs, and simulate certain algorithms for information dissemination and epidemic spreading on them. The results show that the created graphs exhibit very similar topological and algorithmic properties as the real-world graphs, providing evidence that they can be used as surrogates in social network analysis. Furthermore, our model is highly scalable, which enables us to create graphs of arbitrary size with almost the same properties as the corresponding real-world networks.