arXiv AI

ToolRobustBench: Stage-Wise Perturbation Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Tool-Calling Agents

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

ParaRecover: A Process-Level Benchmark for Error Localization and Recovery in Parallel Tool-Use Agents

ParaRecover is a new process-level benchmark designed to evaluate error localization and recovery in multi-turn parallel tool-use agents. It contains 10,626 instances across two difficulty levels, built on a taxonomy of 14 error types that cover planning dependencies, tool selection, and argument matching. The benchmark introduces the SDE rubric, which assesses structural integrity, diagnostic reasoning, and evolutionary strategy during agent execution, and demonstrates that it can guide improvements in agents’ reflective recovery capabilities.

By Bowen Guan, Zhentao Yin, Yanming Shen
arXiv AI
Jun 16

ToolMenuBench: Benchmarking Tool-Menu Filtering Strategies for Reliable and Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 15508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents increasingly operate over large tool libraries, but existing evaluations often focus on whether a model can call a tool correctly rather than how the visible tool menu shapes reliability, efficiency, and safety-relevant risk exposure.

By Rahul Suresh Babu, Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Harness Engineering in LLM Tool Use via Agent-Native Reusable Tool Primitives

The paper introduces Tool Primitives, a design that replaces rigid API schemas with natural language interfaces for tool calling, enabling seamless inter-tool communication. It builds ToolFace, a repository of over 25,000 functions that LLMs can dynamically retrieve, and HEART, a harness engineering framework that orchestrates tool use with planning, routing, and verification. Experiments show HEART outperforms fine‑tuned models and leading commercial LLMs while cutting API costs by up to 85%.

By Haibo Jin, Suijin Wang, Xucheng Yu, Haojing Luo, Haohan Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Calibration is the Bottleneck: An Action-Class Diagnostic of Multi-Turn Tool-Calling

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 AI
Sep 24

Silent Failures in Agent-Tool Interaction: An Audit of ToolUniverse

The paper audits silent failures in agent-to-tool interactions within the ToolUniverse environment, focusing on 15 scientific tools. It identifies 91 failures—primarily missing data or inconsistent search/filtering—occurring mainly in the API and wrapper layers, and shows how these silent failures can propagate downstream into seemingly valid outputs. The authors propose contextual reliability and recommend testing, disclosure, monitoring, and measurement strategies for the agent-tool pipeline.

By Shreya Gopalan, Devansh Singh, Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan