Implicit Intelligence -- Evaluating Agents on What Users Don't Say
Organizations: Applied Machine Learning Research
Abstract
Real-world requests to AI agents are fundamentally underspecified. Natural human communication relies on shared context and unstated constraints that speakers expect listeners to infer. Current agentic benchmarks test explicit instruction-following but fail to evaluate whether agents can reason about implicit requirements spanning accessibility needs, privacy boundaries, catastrophic risks, and contextual constraints. We present Implicit Intelligence, an evaluation framework testing whether AI agents can move beyond prompt-following to become genuine goal-fulfillers, paired with Agent-as-a-World (AaW), a harness where interactive worlds are defined in human-readable YAML files and simulated by language models. Our scenarios feature apparent simplicity in user requests, hidden complexity in correct solutions, and discoverability of constraints through environmental exploration. Evaluating 16 frontier and open-weight models across 205 scenarios, we find that even the best-performing model achieves only 48.3% scenario pass rate, revealing substantial room for improvement in bridging the gap between literal instruction-following and human-like contextual reasoning.
Figures & tables
| Category | Count | Percentage |
| Implicit Reasoning | 70 | 34% |
| Catastrophic Risk | 56 | 27% |
| Privacy & Security | 46 | 23% |
| Accessibility | 33 | 16% |
| Total | 205 | 100% |
| Model | SPR (%) | NSS (%) | Implicit | Catastrophic | Privacy | Access. |
| OpenAI | ||||||
| GPT-4.1 | 18.5 ±5.4 | 49.4 ±4.5 | 21.4 | 19.6 | 10.9 | 21.2 |
| GPT-5 | 44.9 ±6.8 | 71.4 ±4.2 | 41.4 | 48.2 | 43.5 | 48.5 |
| GPT-5.1 | 20.5 ±5.6 | 53.2 ±4.4 | 15.7 | 30.4 | 15.2 | 21.2 |
| GPT-5.2 | 33.7 ±6.6 | 62.3 ±4.5 | 24.3 | 39.3 | 37.0 | 39.4 |
| GPT-5.2-pro | 48.3 ±6.8 | 72.7 ±4.3 | 51.4 | 48.2 | 47.8 | 42.4 |
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Category | Actions |
|---|---|
| apps/apple-tv-remote | Launch Screen Saver, Open App on Apple TV, Play/Pause Apple TV, Show Remote Control, Skip Content on Apple TV, Switch User Account, Switch to Light/Dark Mode, Toggle Captions on Apple TV, Toggle Reduce Loud Sounds, Wake Apple TV |
| apps/apple-watch | Get Current Watch Face, List Watch Faces, Ping My iPhone, Set Always On, Set Auto-Launch Audio Apps, Set Schooltime, Set Silent Mode, Set Theater Mode, Set Wake On Wrist Raise, Set Watch Face, Set Water Lock |
| apps/calendar | Add New Event, Edit Calendar Event, Filter Event Attendees, Find Calendar Events, Get Details of Calendar Events, Get Details of Event Attendees, Get Upcoming Events, Remove Events, Show in Calendar |
| apps/clock | Create Alarm, Get All Alarms, Start Timer, Toggle Alarm |
| apps/contacts | Call, Contacts, Edit Contact, Find Contacts, Get Contacts from Input, Get Details of Contacts, Get Phone Numbers from Input, Phone Number, Select Contact, Select Phone Number |
| apps/dates | Adjust Date, Date, Format Date, Get Dates from Input, Get Time Between Dates |
| Model | Exact Match | Action Type | Status |
| Gemini 3 Pro | 85.19% | 96.29% | Failed |
| GPT-5 | 83.63% | 97.00% | Failed |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | 93.29% | 98.64% | Selected |
| Model | SPR | SPR (High) | SPR | NSS |
| GPT-5 | 44.9 | 41.5 | 3.4 | 2.1 |
| GPT-5.2 | 33.7 | 35.1 | 1.4 | 2.9 |
| GPT-5.2-pro | 48.3 | 47.3 | 1.0 | 1.5 |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | 39.5 | 41.0 | 1.5 | 1.4 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | 28.3 | 27.8 | 0.5 | 0.2 |
| Gemini 3 Pro | 38.5 | 37.6 | 1.0 | 1.3 |
| Model | Endpoint |
| GPT-4.1 | openai/gpt-4.1 |
| GPT-5 | openai/gpt-5 |
| GPT-5.1 | openai/gpt-5.1 |
| GPT-5.2 | openai/gpt-5.2 |
| GPT-5.2-pro | openai/gpt-5.2-pro |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 |
AI Agent Evaluation
AI agent evaluation measures whether tool-using systems complete tasks reliably, safely, and efficiently across interactive settings.
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