arXiv AI

When Tools Fail: Benchmarking Dynamic Replanning and Anomaly Recovery in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 05806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing benchmarks evaluate Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) in LLMs on idealized ''happy paths'', largely overlooking real-world tool failures.

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 Machine Learning
Sep 17

Locating Hidden Failures Makes Long-Horizon Agents More Reliable

The paper introduces Traverse, a benchmark of 2,518 agent trajectories and 6,967 annotated mistakes across software engineering, computer use, and science tasks, revealing that failures often go unrecovered and can cause irreversible harm before a run is deemed successful. It shows that human judges struggle to detect the first mistake in most runs, while a 4‑billion‑parameter verifier called Scout can locate failures more effectively and improve task success when used to select among candidate runs. The study demonstrates that making failure detection inexpensive and reliable can enable long‑horizon agents to learn from their own mistakes and increase trustworthiness in autonomous AI.

By Salman Rahman, Yubin Kim, Mihir Parmar, A. Ali Heydari, Genglin Liu, Simon A. Lee, Weizhi Zhang, Arian Hosseini, Ahmed A. Metwally, Yuzhe Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Xin Liu, Pavel Izmailov, Saadia Gabriel, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Daniel McDuff, Hamid Palangi
arXiv AI
Jul 14

AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?

arXiv:2607. 10059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for autonomous tasks, yet existing evaluations mostly focus on task success rather than whether agents know when to abstain.

By Xun Liu, Yi Evie Zhang, Vira Kasprova, Parisa Rabbani, Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Tianyu Zhang, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran
arXiv AI
Jul 24

DynamicMCPBench: A Trace-Grounded, Effect-Scored Benchmark for LLM Agents over Live MCP Servers

arXiv:2607. 20531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed over Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, yet the benchmarks used to evaluate them score the final answer or a fixed "ground-truth" list of tools, both of which are fragile once the underlying data is live and stateful.

By Jerzy Kami\'nski, Ilya Galyukshev, Artem Kuznetsov, Sergey Chuprin, Kirill Redko, Aidar Shumbalov, Anna Kalyuzhnaya
arXiv AI
Aug 18

When Agentic Executions Fail: Detecting and Localizing Runtime Faults from Telemetry

arXiv:2608. 14680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliability in LLM-based agentic systems is a property of the whole execution (its tool calls, model calls, guardrails, and inter-agent messages), not of the final answer alone, yet evaluating only task outcomes reveals little about how or why a run fails.

By Chenkai Zhang, Yiran Li, Yifang Tian, Michalis Bachras, Hans-Arno Jacobsen
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