ToolRobustBench is a stage-wise diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate and diagnose failures in tool‑calling agents, which are large language models that select tools, provide structured arguments, and interpret tool feedback. The benchmark aligns four perturbation families—tool‑interface, user‑intent, tool‑output/observation, and runtime‑environment—with the tool‑use pipeline, attributing failures to specific stages such as tool selection, schema grounding, argument binding, and feedback handling. Experiments across 15,456 instances, 7 models, and 16 local tools reveal that while overall performance is high, robustness degrades significantly, especially under tool‑output/observation perturbations, and mixed‑family perturbations produce non‑additive failure patterns.
By YiShan Zheng, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv:2608. 08700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable evaluation of tool routing is critical as Large Language Models increasingly operate as autonomous agents.
By Dongjie Xu, Julius, Hanchi Dong, Minghua Tang, Yuxuan Sun, Ziwei Nie, Zicheng Liu, Dujun Qing, Jiajie Xu
arXiv:2607. 04686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool calling is central to modern language model agents, but aggregate benchmark scores often hide where tool use fails.
By Harsh Soni
arXiv:2606. 03852v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often generate code with bugs.
By Yinsheng Yao, Hongxiang Zhang, Weixi Tong, Tianyi Zhang
arXiv:2601. 05366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls.
By Zheng Luo, T Pranav Kutralingam, Ogochukwu N Okoani, Wanpeng Xu, Hua Wei, Xiyang Hu
The paper "Can You Check That? The Checkability Boundary for Local LLM Network Automation" proposes a method called Touchstone that uses local small language models (SLMs) to generate network‑automation candidates and applies task‑specific intrinsic checks to reject incorrect outputs before escalating to a larger frontier LLM. By defining a task as checkable when a cheap, deterministic test can reject outputs violating a necessary correctness condition, the authors demonstrate that Touchstone achieves high end‑to‑end accuracy (98.6% on conflict detection and 93.8% on intent translation) while escalating only a small fraction of inputs. The study shows that local inference is preferable when precise, low‑cost checks are available, whereas tasks lacking such checks should rely on the frontier model.
By Maleeha Masood, Momina Nofal
The paper introduces an action‑class diagnostic framework for multi‑turn tool‑calling in large language model agents, breaking failures into action‑class miscalibration and action‑execution failure across a four‑class action space (TOOL_CALL, ASK, REFUSE, CONFIRM). It defines a self‑revealing upper bound (Acc GAR) to expose state‑grader masking of miscalibration and shows that miscalibration is a significant, previously hidden failure mode, especially for heavily tool‑trained families. The study demonstrates that calibration can be reshaped by context‑only perturbations, but the effects vary widely across models and perturbation mechanisms, underscoring the need for diagnostics beyond aggregate accuracy.
By Kangjia Zhao, Jiajun Li, Haozhan Shen, Wei Chow, Linfeng Li, Hang Song, Lingdong Kong, Chen Zhi, Tiancheng Zhao, Songhua Liu, Jianwei Yin
arXiv:2606. 08840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Code generation models are typically compared using compact execution benchmarks and aggregate pass rates, but such summaries obscure how performance varies across programming languages, problem families, and failure modes.
By Sayed Erfan Arefin
arXiv:2609.26693v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A coding agent must emit a valid tool call--a parseable invocation of a tool in the provided schema--before the harness can execute its chosen action....
By Lijuan Tang, Yuemeng Zheng
arXiv:2608. 03071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents derive much of their capability from tool use.
By Guoyao Yu, Xiaoqing Sun, Ziqi Huang, Shaojing Fan, Zhongyi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Xiaobo Xue, Yangyang Shi, Xiong Xiao, Yang Song, Biao Lyu, Rong Wen, Xing Li, Qinming He, Shunming Zhu, Zhenguang Liu
arXiv:2606. 03657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models for code generation often need to use APIs that are absent from their pretraining data.
By Jinnuo Liu, Yue Peng, Jinhan Niu, Hongyi Wen
arXiv:2606. 27406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering, whether performed by humans or by AI agents, requires reasoning about how software behaves.
By Egor Bogomolov, Yaroslav Zharov