ReliabilityBench: Evaluating LLM Agent Reliability Under Production-Like Stress (2026)
Free3D reliability surface R(k,ε,λ) unifying consistency, robustness, fault tolerance — chaos engineering for agents; ReAct outperforms Reflexion under stress; pass@1 overestimates reliability by 20–40%
About ReliabilityBench: Evaluating LLM Agent Reliability Under Production-Like Stress (2026)
ReliabilityBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the production readiness of LLM agents by assessing their reliability under stress conditions. It introduces a unified 3D reliability surface R(k,ε,λ) that captures three critical dimensions: consistency under repeated execution (using pass^k), robustness to semantically equivalent task perturbations at intensity ε, and fault tolerance under controlled tool and API failures at intensity λ. The benchmark employs action metamorphic relations to define correctness by end-state equivalence rather than text similarity, and includes a chaos-engineering-inspired fault injection framework that simulates timeouts, rate limits, partial responses, and schema drift. The framework was evaluated on two models (Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o) and two agent architectures (ReAct and Reflexion) across four domains (scheduling, travel, customer support, e-commerce) over 1,280 episodes. Key findings include that perturbations alone reduce success rates from 96.9% (ε=0) to 88.1% (ε=0.2), rate limiting is the most destructive fault type, ReAct outperforms Reflexion under combined stress, and Gemini 2.0 Flash achieves comparable reliability to GPT-4o at significantly lower cost. ReliabilityBench provides a systematic method for stress-testing agent reliability before deployment in production environments.
Key Features
Pros & Cons
- Provides a comprehensive reliability evaluation beyond single-run success rates
- Incorporates realistic stress factors like perturbations and API failures
- Identifies specific failure patterns (e.g., rate limiting is most damaging)
- Enables low-cost reliability assessment with Gemini 2.0 Flash achieving comparable results to GPT-4o
- Open-source benchmark with systematic methodology for reproducibility
- Limited to two models and two agent architectures in the initial evaluation
- May not cover all possible failure modes in diverse production environments
- Requires setting up fault injection infrastructure to replicate the benchmark
- Benchmark domains are limited to four areas; broader coverage would strengthen conclusions