The Range Shrinks, the Threat Remains: Re-evaluating LLM Package Hallucinations on the 2026 Frontier-Model Cohort
arXiv:2605. 17062v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spracklen et al.
The paper investigates a new failure mode of tool‑augmented large language model agents: calling non‑existent tools with arguments that do not match any declared schema. It introduces a five‑class taxonomy of tool hallucination, presents a training‑free closed‑world resolver that checks registry membership and signatures, and demonstrates that hallucinations persist across ten hosted models and various invocation surfaces, including the Model Context Protocol. The authors release a Hallucinated‑Tools Benchmark to enable comparison of resolver methods.
arXiv:2605. 17062v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spracklen et al.
arXiv:2608. 02680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents repeatedly rediscover procedures they have already executed, producing traces that mix reusable structure with retries, exploration, accidental ordering, and repeated lookups.
arXiv:2605. 05138v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We evaluate an initial coding-agent system for ARC-AGI-3 in which the agent maintains an executable Python world model, verifies it against previous observations, refactors it toward simpler abstractions as a practical proxy for an MDL-like simplicity bias, and plans through the model before acting.
arXiv:2607. 25364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using agents expose structured calls but commonly attach free-form rationales.
The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on long‑horizon state tracking by having them compute the MD5 hash through 196 dependent tool calls across 64 rounds, carrying four 32‑bit words in context. It shows that a mixture‑of‑experts LLM can maintain the full state and produce correct digests in most runs, even when all primitive tools are replaced by another LLM. The study isolates state‑tracking difficulty from instruction interpretation and identifies key factors—contextual reasoning and worker voting—that enable success.
The paper proposes typed federated artifacts—schema‑validated objects with per‑field privacy and dispute resolution—to enable tool‑routing knowledge sharing among frozen, heterogeneous LLM agents. By replacing flat text prompts with typed fields, the authors achieve near‑centralized routing performance on StableToolBench while reducing data size to 20 MB JSON per client. The study also highlights that a simple TF‑IDF classifier can outperform LLM routing on labeled benchmarks, indicating limitations in current evaluation methods.
The paper investigates how AI agents that run long workflows using external tools can experience inconsistencies when retries, speculative execution, concurrency, or partial failures occur. It introduces an effect‑history model that distinguishes between actual external events and the agent’s observations, and catalogs eight common external‑effect anomalies. The authors analyze the standard Model Context Protocol tool interface, finding that its annotations are too coarse to fully express the necessary capabilities to prevent these anomalies, thereby motivating the need for reusable transactional contracts at the agent‑tool boundary.
arXiv:2608. 04719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent evaluations tell us that a model picked the wrong tool, but rarely why.
The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.
arXiv:2609.14758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented language models are evaluated on whether they reach the right answer, not on whether they report honestly when a tool fails to supply...
arXiv:2609.24165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synchrotron data reduction, detector calibration followed by azimuthal integration of terabyte-scale diffraction series, is a multi-step, expert-bound...
arXiv:2608. 07952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents can harbor implicit state that persists across sessions, activates through events, and propagates across agent boundaries---largely invisible to standard debugging.