Beyond Goodhart's Law: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating Compliance in Multi-Agent Systems

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 5 Jun 2026] Beyond Goodhart's Law: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating Compliance in Multi-Agent Systems Yiyang Zhao, Zhuo Zhang, Qingxuan Le, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive assistants to autonomous, execution-capable agents has introduced critical operational risks. Most current evaluation frameworks neglect procedural compliance, leading to ''Machiavellian'' behaviors where agents strategically violate safety rules to maximize rewards - a direct manifestation of Goodhart's Law. To address this blind spot, we introduce MAC-Bench, a dynamic, adversarial benchmark designed to evaluate the procedural alignment of multi-agent systems under realistic pressure. We propose the SERV(Seed - Evolve - Refine - Verify) pipeline, an ``Agent-as-a-Benchmark'' paradigm that transforms unstructured legal texts into executable, contamination-free scenarios. By synthesizing holographic sandbox environments and injecting calibrated social-engineering pressure vectors, MAC-Bench forces agents into Pareto-optimal trade-offs between task success and regulatory adherence. We introduced novel metrics: the Compliance-Weighted Success Rate (CSR) and the Machiavellian Gap (MG), and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art frontier models to reveal the pervasive trade-offs between success and compliance. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) Cite as: arXiv:2606.07805 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.07805v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.07805 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yiyang Zhao [view email] [v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 19:33:58 UTC (1,696 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.MA References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)