evaluate — honest, multi-trial scoring

Turns a candidate into a score you can trust. A reward number is only as honest as the variance around it and as the denominator under it: agents are stochastic, and infrastructure fails. evaluate produces a point estimate, its uncertainty, and the count of tasks that actually produced a measurement. The math lives in cap_evolve.stats; this skill drives the adapter and aggregates.

What it produces

A SplitResult (core/cap_evolve/loop.py:59-115):

• reward — the mean, over the tasks that were scored, of each task's mean over its valid trials (harness.py:405-414, loop.py:127-131). Not the mean over every task in the split — see the next section.
• n_tasks / n_scored (and coverage = n_scored/n_tasks, loop.py:79-84) — the honest denominator. Read these on every result, never reward alone.
• stderr — the combined SE of that reported mean: between-task variance (do different tasks agree?) folded with within-task trial variance (is the agent consistent on a fixed task?), stats.combined_stderr. This is what the report prints and what the gate's significant mode consumes — not what the default gate reads; see "What the gate actually consumes".
• pass_k — when trials > 1, the estimated probability that all k i.i.d. trials pass (reliability). Also pass_at_k — at least one of k passes (capability). Opposite questions; see references/concepts.md.
• per-task scores + feedback, and the rollout files diagnose reads: <run-dir>/rollouts/<split>/<task>__<tag>__t<k>.json (harness.py:334).

A crashed rollout is missing data, not a zero

The single largest honesty mechanism in the eval path. Two ways a trial produces no measurement:

• the runner errored (rollout.error set) — the target never ran;
• the rollout succeeded and the scorer could not grade it (crashed grading harness, missing report file). There is no rollout.error, so adapters must flag it by setting Score.raw["errored"] (harness.py:308-323). An adapter that doesn't is how a scorer outage becomes a real 0.0.

Such a trial is excluded from the mean (harness.py:324-331), and a task with zero valid trials is dropped from every statistic (loop.py:118-127). Averaging its 0.0 in would state that the capability failed a task it was never given — which is how a registry rate-limit storm produced val 0.000 and taught the optimizer to "fix" content that was never at fault. The rollout file is still written, for forensics.

What to check. raw.valid_trials == 0 on a per-task record means unmeasured, not failed. A reward computed over a third of a split describes the infrastructure, not the edit. Below coverage 0.6 the gate returns indecisive=True and declines to judge rather than calling it a regression (gate.py:137-146) — a run producing repeated indecisive steps has an infrastructure fault, not a bad optimizer. Pinned by core/tests/test_infra_errors_not_zeros.py (518 lines).

What the gate actually consumes

When per-task data is available the loop sets gate mode to paired (harness.py:1524-1526), and paired mode recomputes the SE from the per-task deltas against the same tasks (gate.py:156-160); SplitResult.stderr is never read on that path. So what extra trials buy you under the default gate is a more stable per-task mean, which shrinks the paired delta variance — not a smaller stderr. stderr feeds the report and the significant fallback used when paired data is unavailable (gate.py:184-207).

How to run

python scripts/run.py --run-dir .capevolve/run_XXXX --project .capevolve/project \
    --candidate seed --split val --n-trials 3

• --split accepts only train or val, enforced by argparse choices (scripts/run.py:25) — a --split test invocation exits non-zero. The enforcement lives in this CLI, not in harness.evaluate_candidate (issue #361), so never "helpfully" widen those choices.
• --n-trials defaults to 1. On a stochastic target that is the degenerate case below; run.py prints a warning to stderr when it happens.
• --ks picks the k values for pass^k; it defaults to 1..n_trials, so --n-trials 3 reports pass^1..pass^3. Any k above a task's trial count is omitted rather than reported as 0.0 (loop.py:134-147).
• CAPEVOLVE_WORKERS=N generates rollouts through a thread pool (harness.py:49-57); scoring stays serial so the numbers match a serial run. Keep it at 1 if run_target is not thread-safe (shared scratch dir, one live container, module-global client) — harness.py:225-227.
• A subset/triage eval (ids=) is never gateable: its n_tasks is the subset, so coverage reads 1.0 (harness.py:229-237).

How much measurement do you need

Two axes, and the trials axis is the one people get wrong.

• Trials. Deterministic scorer + greedy decode: 1 trial is honest. Any sampling / temperature / tool nondeterminism: ≥3–4. Trials are only independent draws if the adapter forwards the per-trial seed — trial k runs with seed = base_seed + k (harness.py:374, trials.py:10-13) and the adapter contract requires passing it to a stochastic runner (adapter.py:52-54). An adapter that drops it gives you n identical copies: per-task stderr is 0, pass^k is exactly 0 or 1, and the whole apparatus looks healthy while measuring nothing. cap-evolve check can prove it: with CAPEVOLVE_N_TRIALS=3 CAPEVOLVE_CHECK_TRIAL_PROBE=1 it fires two real rollouts at different seeds and warns if they are byte-identical (core/cap_evolve/check.py:169-190). It is opt-in because the probe costs real rollouts — run it once per adapter, and treat the warning as "every variance number here is fiction". Trials cost budget linearly, so spend them where variance actually threatens a decision — the val split the gate reads — not on every exploratory probe.
• Tasks. stats.stderr returns 0.0 below 2 tasks and combined_stderr's between-task term is 0 below 2 (stats.py:28-30, 47-50), so a 1-task val gives stderr = 0, a bar of 0, and the gate degenerates to strict ("any Δ>0 wins") with a logged warning (gate.py:40-60). Below roughly 5 val tasks the k·SE bar is dominated by sample size and is optimistic — issue #113. An empty val presents as coverage 1.0 with reward 0.0 (loop.py:79-84).

A one-task gain is not reliably bankable. Under the shipped default (mode: paired, k_se: 1.0) a candidate that improves exactly one val task and changes nothing else has Δ̄ == SE(Δ) algebraically, so the strict > at gate.py:176 is settled by floating-point representation — rejected at n=4, 8, 50, accepted at n=20, identical printed numbers. Issue #351, open; derivation in references/concepts.md. Do not read a rejection of a single-task fix as evidence the edit was bad — check how many tasks moved.

What good vs bad looks like

• Good: n_trials ≥ 3 on a stochastic agent with the seed forwarded; stderr non-zero; n_scored == n_tasks; pass^k inspected alongside the mean.
• Bad: a plausible low reward that is an infrastructure outage, not a capability measurement (check coverage first, always); single-trial scores feeding a significance gate; identical trial rewards across seeds; trusting a high mean when pass^k is low (the gain is fragile).

References

• references/concepts.md (125 lines) — the variance decomposition and the combined-SE formula, where these statistics break down on small samples (including the #351 Δ̄ == SE derivation), pass^k vs pass@k with their unbiased estimators, bootstrap CIs, where the test-split refusal is enforced, and sources. Load it when you need the statistics themselves rather than how to run an evaluation.