AEVAL: From Anecdotal to Deterministic Testing for Agentic Skill Workflows

Modern agentic systems increasingly rely on skills: installable packages of natural language and code that teach an LLM agent to perform a domain task. As skill repositories grow, developers need automated quality signals on every change, yet evaluation today is largely anecdotal: a developer asks an agent to "try the skill," watches a demo, and forms a subjective impression. This yields neither reproducibility across runs nor comparability across versions, and scales poorly to marketplaces where one regression can silently break dozens of downstream workflows. We present AEVAL (Agentic Evaluation), a CI-integrated framework that replaces this practice with a deterministic, reproducible test pipeline for agentic skills. Every skill change triggers a test event: the skill runs against a developer declared evaluation contract inside an automated executor, emitting a structured, evidence grounded quality signal that downstream CI can route on. A key ingredient is a structural separation between executor and grader, preventing a subtle but pervasive failure mode: an agent that silently self-corrects during execution and then grades its own patched outputs as passing. Our contributions are: (i) a deterministic, change-triggered evaluation protocol with per-skill contracts and per-run artifact schemas; (ii) a formalization of self correction bias as a distinct failure mode of naive agentic evaluators; (iii) an executor/grader separation with a first-attempt grading rule and explicit self-correction tracking; and (iv) a tiered, grounded evidence fix suggestion scheme (LV1 causal, LV2 quality) posted as inline merge-request comments. Validated on real skills in a production agentic stack across multiple agent SDKs, AEVAL converts spurious 100% pass rates into reproducible first-attempt fail signals with an auditable record of every executor fix.

MAVEN: A Multi-stage Agentic Annotation Pipeline for Video Reasoning Tasks

Training Vision Language Models (VLMs) for video event reasoning requires high-quality structured annotations capturing not only what happened, but when, where, why, and with what consequence, at a scale manual labelling cannot support. We present MAVEN (Multi-stage Agentic Video Event aNnotation), a multi-stage agentic pipeline that turns raw videos into multi-task training data with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces, organized around a designated Event of Focus. At its core, MAVEN synthesizes a Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Event Description (MSTED) from three complementary caption levels; this explicit intermediate serves as the sole input to downstream Q&A generation across multiple task formats. Crucially, MAVEN supports agent-driven domain adaptation: given a new video dataset and target question examples, the agent redesigns all prompts top-down without manual re-engineering. A hierarchical refinement loop further classifies annotation errors against a taxonomy, traces root causes to the originating pipeline stage, and applies targeted edits that rewrite prompts or modify the pipeline structure itself, iteratively improving data quality. We apply MAVEN to label over 5,300 traffic videos and fine-tune Cosmos-Reason2-8B on the resulting data. On a private CCTV evaluation set, fine-tuning surpasses both Gemini 2.5 Pro and 3.1 Flash, including a $+38.8$-point gain in MCQ accuracy over zero-shot. On AccidentBench, CCTV-only training lifts Cosmos-Reason2 by $+10.7$ MCQ points and matches Gemini 2.5 Pro despite seeing no dashcam videos; adding agent-adapted dashcam annotations narrows the gap to Gemini 3.1 Flash, and RL post-training pushes overall performance past both Gemini baselines. Qualitative results on warehouse surveillance and public safety videos further show the agentic workflow readily adapts the pipeline to new domains.