ToolRobustBench: Stage-Wise Perturbation Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Tool-Calling Agents

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23635v1
• Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:22:49 GMT
• Title: ToolRobustBench: Stage-Wise Perturbation Evaluation and Failure Diagnosis for Tool-Calling Agents
• Abstract summary: Large language models rely on tool calling as a fundamental agent capability.<n>Clean end-to-end (E2E) success cannot identify where a tool-use failure originates or how it propagates through a call.<n>We introduce ToolRobustBench, a stage-wise diagnostic benchmark for tool-calling agents.
• Score: 16.995082216096787
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) rely on tool calling as a fundamental agent capability, enabling them to invoke external systems and complete tasks beyond text generation. However, clean end-to-end (E2E) success cannot identify where a tool-use failure originates or how it propagates through a call. We introduce ToolRobustBench, a stage-wise diagnostic benchmark for tool-calling agents, where a tool-calling agent is an LLM system that selects a tool, supplies structured arguments, and interprets its returned feedback. ToolRobustBench aligns four perturbation families with the tool-use pipeline: tool-interface, user-intent, tool-output/observation, and runtime-environment perturbations. It attributes failures to tool selection, schema grounding, argument binding, tool-output/runtime-feedback handling, and E2E task success. Experiments on 15,456 single-family instances across 7 models, 16 sampled local tools, 4 perturbation families, and 14 subtypes show high but non-uniform clean performance and substantial robustness degradation, with tool-output/observation perturbation the dominant bottleneck. Mixed-family experiments reveal non-additive failure patterns that are not explained by isolated single-family results. Thus, ToolRobustBench provides a deterministic and cascade-aware benchmark for diagnosing robustness beyond clean tool-calling accuracy;

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