arXiv AI

The Remarkable Effectiveness of Providing AI Agents with Natural Language Tools: A Replication Study Validating NLT Performance Across 14 Models

arXiv:2607. 03953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study independently replicates and extends the Natural Language Tools (NLT) framework of Johnson et al.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Grow the Harness, Not the Context: From Strategy-Free Scaffolds to Reusable Specialist Agents

The paper introduces Growing Harness, a training method that transforms recurring control logic in large language model agents into reusable executable code, reducing reliance on the model for task-specific decisions. By using strategy-free scaffolds, failure-guided code repair, and success-first gating, the approach learns a shared harness that improves performance across multiple benchmarks and model sizes. Experiments on BrowseComp-Plus and WebArena-Verified show significant gains in success rates and substantial reductions in LLM calls and inference cost compared to traditional tool‑calling agents.

By Laizhen Li, Jiarui Li, Juanjuan Zhao, Kejiang Ye, Ye Li, Cheng-zhong Xu, Xitong Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 11

AgentAudit: An Open, Extensible Framework for Full-Lifecycle Trust Evaluation of AI Agents

AgentAudit is an open, extensible framework that evaluates the full lifecycle of AI agents, assessing planning, tool selection, execution, memory, and reasoning across ten dimensions such as instruction integrity, security, and alignment. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on single aspects, AgentAudit analyzes the entire execution trace to attribute failures to specific stages. The framework was tested on five large language models, revealing significant differences in trustworthiness even among models with similar task‑completion performance.

By Shrey Nag, Sachita, Abhishek Kumar Singh, Lipi Goel, Rajeshwar Singh Janwar
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

CCTU: A Benchmark for Tool Use under Complex Constraints

CCTU is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their ability to use tools under complex constraints. It includes 200 test cases that average seven constraint types and 4,700‑token prompts, covering resource, behavior, toolset, and response dimensions. An executable validation module performs step‑level checks, and nine state‑of‑the‑art LLMs were tested, revealing that none exceed a 20% task completion rate when strict constraints are enforced, with frequent violations and limited self‑refinement.

By Junjie Ye, Guoqiang Zhang, Wenjie Fu, Zelin Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 12

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.

By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Agent Seer: Synthesizing Scenarios from Specification Understanding

Agent Seer is a pipeline that automatically synthesizes realistic evaluation scenarios for AI agents that use external tools, using only the tool’s specification (function names, natural‑language descriptions, and typed parameter schemas). Starting from a single Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification, it enriches raw schemas, generates graded scenarios with synthetic tool outputs, and expands them into mock‑data‑grounded multi‑turn dialogues that demonstrate strong tool‑calling correctness and conversational coherence. Across seven diverse MCP specifications, the pipeline achieves high quality, with parameter‑schema complexity emerging as the main driver of quality variation and argument‑value accuracy identified as the dominant failure mode.

By Harish Karumuri, Mahesh Vemula, David Lopes Pegna
arXiv AI
Aug 13

VAKRA: Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning Across APIs and Retrieval Under Tool-Use Policies

arXiv:2608. 12282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation.

By Ankita Rajaram Naik, Anupama Murthi, Benjamin Elder, Siyu Huo, Raavi Gupta, Abhinav Jain, Praveen Venkateswaran, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Danish Contractor