arXiv AI

Eta Given Delta: Defining LLM Tool Efficiency With Marginal Tool Utility

arXiv:2607. 14108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces tool efficiency, a new quantitative metric to evaluate the rate of useful tool calls in an LLM agent trajectory.

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
Aug 11

$A^2E$ : An End-to-End Agent Auditing Engine

arXiv:2608. 07346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains.

By Haoning Wang, Mingxun Zhang, Chenyue Yu, Yingjun Shang, Xia Hu, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
arXiv AI
Sep 17

RideWay: Benchmarking Efficient Task Completion for Tool-Using Language Agents

RideWay is a new benchmark that evaluates ride‑hailing language agents not just on task completion but on interaction efficiency. It introduces the Efficiency Utility metric, which penalizes agents for excessive tool calls and user‑facing turns relative to a task‑specific reference effort, with human preferences used to calibrate the penalties. Across 58 tasks and 24 models, the metric shows that extra dialogue is penalized more heavily than extra tool use, and it achieves high accuracy in distinguishing trajectories that differ in turns but struggles when differences are only in tool calls.

By Qingnuan Han, Boli Fang, Mingzhi Hou, Claire Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 10

An End-to-End Agent Auditing Engine

arXiv:2608. 07346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), harnesses have become essential infrastructure for deploying agents across a wide range of domains.

By Haoning Wang, Mingxun Zhang, Chenyue Yu, Yingjun Shang, Xia Hu, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou
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

UniACE: A Unified Framework for Evaluating LLM Agentic Capabilities

UniACE is a unified framework that standardizes the evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents by representing each benchmark as an instruction–tool–environment triplet and running models through a shared, task‑agnostic harness in isolated runtimes. It preserves native success criteria, offers an offline mode for dynamic‑resource tasks, and standardizes efficiency metrics, execution records, and failure attribution. Applying UniACE to 7 benchmarks across 24 domains and 15 models revealed significant score shifts, ranking reversals, and sensitivity to evidence representation, highlighting the impact of evaluation configuration on reported agent performance.

By Pengyu Zhu, Lijun Li, Yaxing Lyu, Qianxin Luo, Jingyi Yang, Yi Liu, Tingfeng Hui, Xinyu Yuan, Li Sun, Sen Su, Jing Shao
arXiv AI
Sep 3

UniToolCall: Unifying Tool-Use Representation, Data, and Evaluation for LLM Agents

UniToolCall introduces a unified framework for tool-use in large language model agents, standardizing toolset construction, dataset generation, and evaluation. The framework aggregates over 22,000 tools and creates a hybrid training corpus of more than 390,000 instances by combining ten public datasets with synthetically generated, structurally controlled trajectories. It models diverse interaction patterns—single‑hop vs. multi‑hop, single‑turn vs. multi‑turn, serial vs. parallel execution—and adds an Anchor Linkage mechanism to enforce cross‑turn dependencies, while converting seven public benchmarks into a common Query–Action–Observation–Answer format for fine‑grained evaluation.

By Yijuan Liang, Xinghao Chen, Yifan Ge, Ziyi Wu, Hao Wu, Changyu Zeng, Wei Xing, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

arXiv:2606. 12344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring.

By Mengyu Zheng, Kai Han, Boxun Li, Haiyang Xu, Yuchuan Tian, Wei He, Hang Zhou, Jianyuan Guo, Hailin Hu, Lin Ma, Chao Xu, Guohao Dai, Lixue Xia, Yunchao Wei, Yunhe Wang, Yu Wang