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:2608. 02645v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents rely on external tools to perform multistage tasks.
By Isham Kalappurackal Mansoor, Abhishek Phadke, Pratip Rana
arXiv:2607. 11098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using LLM agents are mostly evaluated assuming all tools work.
By Aritra Mazumder, Nusrat jahan Lia
arXiv:2606. 01416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents rely on orchestration layers that coordinate planning, retrieval, tool invocation, validation, memory, and recovery.
By Rahul Suresh Babu, Adarsh Agrawal
Bench2Robust is a framework that augments existing tool‑using LLM benchmarks with scenario‑controlled solvability, adding episodes that require retrying the original path, switching to a fallback tool, or recognizing that no viable path remains. It separates recovery‑policy quality from randomness in failure persistence, and across 7 models and 10 task slices, 69 of 70 model‑subset pairs degrade under tool failures by up to 46.7 percentage points. The authors introduce Bayesian Tool Memory (BTM) for structured runtime recovery context and use reinforcement learning (RL) for learned recovery behavior, achieving up to a 20.7‑point improvement over the base model without sacrificing clean performance.
By Chaoran Chen, Vy Nguyen, Ziji Zhang, Abhinav Gullapalli, Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Dakuo Wang, Jing Huang, Zhou Yu, Jin Lai
arXiv:2607. 04686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool calling is central to modern language model agents, but aggregate benchmark scores often hide where tool use fails.
By Harsh Soni