Agent Step Value: Auditing Evaluation-Channel Sensitivity in Black-Box Agent Traces

Abstract

Reusing evaluator-derived step rewards across evaluation channels raises a measurement question: does the assigned direction remain stable? We define Agent Step Value (ASV) as a channel-indexed before/after target-margin gain and identify the state-by-channel interaction from a matched 2x2 design. Across frozen PubMed question-answering transitions, cross-channel gain signs disagree on 48.3% of comparisons, compared with 0.3% for same-channel retries. Transition interactions are nearly balanced in sign (median +0.014; 10% trimmed mean -0.033), but asymmetric negative magnitudes produce a positive direct mean and a negative generated-view mean under the empirical target mixture. Equal-target weighting preserves a negative mean interaction but not this strict mean reversal. Matched retrieval designs localize the negative component to the generated-view coordinate and retain its direction across three sign checks that vary readout and evaluator stack. In a matched 512-token source-contract follow-up, source-only generation restores the positive mean direction on artifact-bearing retrievals and removes parser-detected support claims from artifact-free before-state views. These results support an explanation in which generated support inflates the pre-retrieval baseline. The resulting audit can localize channel sensitivity and test an intervention before step rewards are reused.