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TEC: A Collection of Human Trial-and-error Trajectories for Problem Solving

Xinkai Zhang, Jingtao Zhan, Yiqun Liu, Qingyao Ai · Apr 8, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics
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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Trial-and-error is a fundamental strategy for humans to solve complex problems and a necessary capability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems operating in real-world environments. Although several trial-and-error AI techniques have recently been proposed, most of them rely on simple heuristics designed by researchers and achieve limited performance gains. The core issue is the absence of appropriate data: current models cannot learn from detailed records of how humans actually conduct trial-and-error in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a data annotation platform and a corresponding dataset, termed Trial-and-Error Collection (TEC). The platform records users' complete trajectories across multiple trials and collects their reflections after receiving error feedback. Using this platform, we record the problem-solving processes of 46 participants on 58 tasks, resulting in 5,370 trial trajectories along with error reflections across 41,229 webpages. With this dataset, we observe that humans achieve substantially higher accuracy compared to LLMs, which demonstrates that humans are more effective in trial-and-error than LLMs. We believe that the TEC platform and dataset provide a valuable foundation for understanding human trial-and-error behavior and for developing more capable AI systems. Platform and dataset are publicly available.

Low-signal caution for protocol decisions

Use this page for context, then validate protocol choices against stronger HFEPX references before implementation decisions.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence: Low

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Rater Population

missing

Unknown

Rater source not explicitly reported.

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracy

Research Brief

Deterministic synthesis

Trial-and-error is a fundamental strategy for humans to solve complex problems and a necessary capability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems operating in real-world environments. HFEPX signals include Automatic Metrics with confidence 0.35. Updated from current HFEPX corpus.

Generated Apr 12, 2026, 10:26 PM · Grounded in abstract + metadata only

Key Takeaways

  • Trial-and-error is a fundamental strategy for humans to solve complex problems and a necessary capability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems operating in real-world…
  • To address this gap, we introduce a data annotation platform and a corresponding dataset, termed Trial-and-Error Collection (TEC).

Researcher Actions

  • Treat this as method context, then pivot to protocol-specific HFEPX hubs.
  • Identify benchmark choices from full text before operationalizing conclusions.
  • Validate metric comparability (accuracy).

Caveats

  • Generated from title, abstract, and extracted metadata only; full-paper implementation details are not parsed.
  • Low-signal flag detected: protocol relevance may be indirect.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Trial-and-error is a fundamental strategy for humans to solve complex problems and a necessary capability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems operating in real-world environments.
  • To address this gap, we introduce a data annotation platform and a corresponding dataset, termed Trial-and-Error Collection (TEC).
  • With this dataset, we observe that humans achieve substantially higher accuracy compared to LLMs, which demonstrates that humans are more effective in trial-and-error than LLMs.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Trial-and-error is a fundamental strategy for humans to solve complex problems and a necessary capability for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems operating in real-world environments.
  • With this dataset, we observe that humans achieve substantially higher accuracy compared to LLMs, which demonstrates that humans are more effective in trial-and-error than LLMs.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy

Category-Adjacent Papers (Broader Context)

These papers are nearby in arXiv category and useful for broader context, but not necessarily protocol-matched to this paper.

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