open-athena/snowball-v01-bixbench-trace-examples

Snowball v0.1: agent trace examples

Seven selected failure-analysis examples from the official Snowball v0.1 BixBench run, plus four missing-submission examples each from the same checkpoint’s BFCL parity and BiomniBench-DA runs. Open a Trace link to inspect the conversation in Hugging Face's Agent Trace Viewer. These examples were selected to illustrate specific problems; they are not a representative sample or a new evaluation.

Task	What to inspect	Files
bix-10-q1	Answer stated in chat but answer.txt missing	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-28-q6	Simulated tool output in assistant text; no executed tools	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-13-q2	Repetitive response ending at the output limit	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-30-q5	Context exhausted with failed compaction and recovery	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-35-q3	BUSCO score used as evolutionary rate	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-27-q2	Classifications summed across iterations instead of samples	Trace · Original · Verifier
bix-8-q5	P-value rejection that merits adjudication; not regraded	Trace · Original · Verifier

Reading the examples

• bix-10-q1: the model states an odds ratio in chat but never submits answer.txt. This does not establish that its computed answer was correct.
• bix-28-q6: tool-looking text and simulated outputs are assistant text. The native stream contains zero executed tool calls.
• bix-13-q2 and bix-30-q5: repetitive generation and context/compaction failures. Imported compaction events are explicitly labeled in the conversation.
• bix-35-q3 and bix-27-q2: concrete variable-selection and counting mistakes identified in the local audit.
• bix-8-q5: the submitted p-value satisfies the stated reference inequality but was rejected. This is a grading concern, not a corrected grade; the underlying analysis has not been independently recomputed.

BFCL missing-submission examples

Selected the lexicographically first missing-file trial in each of four categories: irrelevance, multiple, parallel, and simple-python. This is a purposive four-case inspection, not a frequency estimate for all 55 missing submissions. All four end with stop, without a compaction event, and their verifiers report missing /app/result.json. The task asks for a JSON description of function calls saved to disk; the described benchmark functions are not necessarily available as live Pi tools.

Task	What to inspect	Files
bfcl-irrelevance-103	Six real tool calls, then JSON in chat; weather function selected for a time question	Trace · Original · Verifier
bfcl-multiple-170	Function-call JSON in chat; zero tool executions and no result file	Trace · Original · Verifier
bfcl-parallel-147	Write commands considered in text but never executed; JSON only in chat	Trace · Original · Verifier
bfcl-simple-python-161	Tries a described benchmark function as a live tool; tool-not-found and no result file	Trace · Original · Verifier

The simple-python example has seven tool-dispatch starts: one unknown-function rejection and six real shell calls. Its final assistant text contains a <tool_response> imitation of an earlier real Python-version output, without another tool execution. None of these four examples fabricates a complete successful execution and file-write transcript like BixBench’s bix-28-q6. The first three demonstrate answers left in chat; the fourth also confuses the benchmark’s described functions with executable agent tools. The proposed JSON answers were not regraded.

BFCL provenance: Pi 0.87.0; run 20261019-104642-open-athena-Snowball-Smartie-RL-2026.10.15.32-step14-bfclparity-pi-e8cb. The result-record audit found 55/123 missing files; this publication adds detailed inspection of four of those cases.

BiomniBench-DA missing-submission examples

Four purposively selected cases illustrate simulated execution, wrong output paths, rejected write arguments, and repetitive output-limit termination. This is not a prevalence estimate. The verifier requires nonempty reports at /app/trace.md or /app/answer.txt; all four recorded missing_submission and zero reward. We inspected the selected final attempts and did not rerun or regrade analyses.

Task	What to inspect	Files
da-26-2	Simulated terminal transcript inside assistant text; zero tool executions	Trace · Original · Verifier verdict
da-10-1	Real report writes to /app/analysis/ instead of required /app/ paths	Trace · Original · Verifier verdict
da-17-5	Report write rejected for missing content argument; report then left in chat	Trace · Original · Verifier verdict
da-18-1	Repetitive generation reaches 16384-token response limit without reports	Trace · Original · Verifier verdict

• da-26-2: one assistant response emits terminal-control JSON and then invents a <user> New Terminal Output block, including directory listings and missing-package errors. There are zero structured tool calls or execution starts. This closely resembles BixBench bix-28-q6: the purported environment observations are model-generated text, not evidence that those commands ran. It does not simulate a successful report submission.
• da-10-1: 20 actual tool dispatches include successful writes to /app/analysis/trace.md and /app/analysis/answer.txt. Those paths do not satisfy the explicit /app/ output contract. The final assistant response also contains a simulated terminal verification transcript; it is not an additional execution. Missing submission here does not mean the model produced no report.
• da-17-5: 21 tool-dispatch starts include a rejected write with only {"path":"/app/trace.md"} and no content. After the validation error, the assistant leaves a report in chat and stops. This combines a tool-argument failure with the chat-only submission behavior observed in BFCL. The original event log preserves the argument deltas; the viewer displays the completed parsed call. The prior audit's parser replay is linked in the analysis, not rerun here.
• da-18-1: after 10 tool calls, the final response contains 8,041 occurrences of “Now” and ends with length at 16,384 output tokens. This resembles BixBench bix-13-q2. No subsequent solver response produces the required reports.

These cases support recurrence of general execution and submission failures across benchmarks. They do not identify a single checkpoint, serving, parser, or harness cause, or establish biological correctness of text and calculations. The first three end with stop; their compaction-end counts are respectively 0, 2, and 1. The length-stop example has one compaction-end event; these counts do not imply compaction caused the failure.

BiomniBench-DA provenance: Pi 0.87.0; run 20261020-144256-open-athena-Snowball-Smartie-RL-2026.10.15.32-step14-biomnibench-da-pi-volume-free50-e8bf; dataset revision e1c8ca5e11a620087bc48d97888eb69176a1f235, campaign derived-input-v1. This supplementary run uses five input variants, MiniMax judging, and a signed-penalty scorer. Its 4.24/100 overall rubric mean is not accuracy; 38/50 tasks had neither required nonempty report. See the full protocol and audit.

BiomniBench verifier copies contain only selected verdict fields from evaluation.json; judge connection configuration is omitted. Original Pi event streams are byte-identical to the archive and passed secret scans. The sessions use the same message-preserving adaptation as the other examples. Source records may contain erroneous model claims and fabricated citations; publication does not validate them.

Minimal format adaptation

The evaluated Harbor version invoked Pi with --no-session, retaining its JSON event stream as agent/pi.txt. HF's Pi viewer requires saved-session message records instead of message_end events.

The files in sessions/ wrap each completed user, assistant, and tool-result message in a native Pi session entry. Message objects are unchanged. Entry IDs are synthetic source-line identifiers; source_line points back into the original stream. Message timestamps are copied from recorded timestamps where available, not invented. Compaction-end events are included as labeled import annotations, preserving their original event payloads. The empty system-message event, streaming updates, and repeated terminal aggregates are omitted from the viewer version and retained in the originals. Text resembling tool calls is not promoted into executed calls.

originals/ contains the complete original streams, renamed to .jsonl. All fifteen original SHA-256 hashes match the archived source files. Secret scans found no matches in these selected files or their verifier logs; no runtime config files are included. Manifest records source and adapted hashes, selected attempt IDs, original rewards, and event counts.

Provenance and scope

• Model: open-athena/Snowball-Smartie-RL-2026.10.15.32-step14.
• Model revision: 6783e9743478bd25a9ce03ab3460e84d6a9814b0.
• Benchmark: bixbench-cli-marin-corrections@3; Pi 1.3.0; MiniMax-M3-MXFP8 judging.
• Run: 20261019-104831-open-athena-Snowball-Smartie-RL-2026.10.15.32-step14-bixbench-pi-72d5.
• Harbor revision: 38742b0f9f411c95e0c01468785cac7bb77c9894.
• Official release results: 19/205 accepted (9.27%, reported as 9.3%).

This publication provides inspection copies only. No solver reruns, judge calls, or score changes were performed. BixBench/BFCL analysis and BiomniBench-DA analysis are recorded in issue #9258.