arXiv AI

Entity Binding Failures in Tool-Augmented Agents

arXiv:2606. 30531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented language-model agents are often evaluated by whether they select the correct tool, produce valid API arguments, and complete the requested task.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

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.

By YiShan Zheng, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
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
arXiv AI
Jun 18

SafeClawBench: Separating Semantic, Audit-Evidence, and Sandbox Harm in Tool-Using LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects.

By Yuchuan Tian, Mengyu Zheng, Haocheng Mei, Ye Yuan, Chao Xu, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Yu Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 15

When Tool Calls Succeed but Workflows Fail: Anomalies at the Agent-Tool Boundary

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.

By Artem Trofimov, Boris Novikov