A new native-runtime benchmark reveals that current frontier AI agents succeed on at most 62 percent of realistic long-horizon CLI tasks.
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$\tau$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains
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abstract
Existing benchmarks do not test language agents on their interaction with human users or ability to follow domain-specific rules, both of which are vital for deploying them in real world applications. We propose $\tau$-bench, a benchmark emulating dynamic conversations between a user (simulated by language models) and a language agent provided with domain-specific API tools and policy guidelines. We employ an efficient and faithful evaluation process that compares the database state at the end of a conversation with the annotated goal state. We also propose a new metric (pass^k) to evaluate the reliability of agent behavior over multiple trials. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art function calling agents (like gpt-4o) succeed on <50% of the tasks, and are quite inconsistent (pass^8 <25% in retail). Our findings point to the need for methods that can improve the ability of agents to act consistently and follow rules reliably.
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- abstract Existing benchmarks do not test language agents on their interaction with human users or ability to follow domain-specific rules, both of which are vital for deploying them in real world applications. We propose $\tau$-bench, a benchmark emulating dynamic conversations between a user (simulated by language models) and a language agent provided with domain-specific API tools and policy guidelines. We employ an efficient and faithful evaluation process that compares the database state at the end of a conversation with the annotated goal state. We also propose a new metric (pass^k) to evaluate th
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representative citing papers
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MCP-Atlas is a new benchmark with 1000 tasks on production MCP servers that uses claim-level scoring to evaluate LLM agents on realistic multi-step tool-use competency.
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
SelSkill applies dual-granularity preference learning to selective skill-or-skip decisions, improving task success by 10.9 points and execution precision by 29.1 points on ALFWorld with Qwen3-8B.
VisualLeakBench shows vision-language agents propagate PII and unsafe text from images to tool arguments at 78.8% and 85.5% baseline rates, with defensive prompts reducing PII leakage to 2% mainly by suppressing tool use while unsafe-text leakage stays at 52.6%.
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Boiling the Frog is a new stateful multi-turn benchmark that finds an aggregate 44.4% strict attack success rate for incremental safety violations across nine AI models, with rates ranging from 20.5% to 92.9%.
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PrefBench benchmark shows zero-shot LLMs achieve deal rates above 0.99 but seller profits only slightly above random and far below a simple concession heuristic across 7,500 episodes.
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SCICONVBENCH is a new benchmark evaluating LLMs on multi-turn disambiguation and inconsistency resolution for task formulation in computational science, with frontier models reaching only 52.7% success on fluid mechanics disambiguation cases.
π-Bench is a new benchmark for evaluating proactive personal assistant agents on 100 multi-turn tasks that include hidden intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity.
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BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
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citing papers explorer
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WildClawBench: A Benchmark for Real-World, Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation
A new native-runtime benchmark reveals that current frontier AI agents succeed on at most 62 percent of realistic long-horizon CLI tasks.
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Agent-ValueBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Agent Values
Agent-ValueBench is the first dedicated benchmark for agent values, showing they diverge from LLM values, form a homogeneous 'Value Tide' across models, and bend under harnesses and skill steering.
-
OccuBench: Evaluating AI Agents on Real-World Professional Tasks via Language Environment Simulation
OccuBench is a new benchmark for AI agents on real-world occupational tasks via LLM-driven simulators, showing no model dominates all industries, implicit faults are hardest, and larger models with more reasoning perform better.
-
MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Servers
MCP-Atlas is a new benchmark with 1000 tasks on production MCP servers that uses claim-level scoring to evaluate LLM agents on realistic multi-step tool-use competency.
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Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
-
Skill or Skip? Learning Selective Skill Invocation in Agentic Tasks via Dual-Granularity Preference Learning
SelSkill applies dual-granularity preference learning to selective skill-or-skip decisions, improving task success by 10.9 points and execution precision by 29.1 points on ALFWorld with Qwen3-8B.
-
VisualLeakBench: Reproducible Action-Boundary Propagation Failures in Vision-Language Agents
VisualLeakBench shows vision-language agents propagate PII and unsafe text from images to tool arguments at 78.8% and 85.5% baseline rates, with defensive prompts reducing PII leakage to 2% mainly by suppressing tool use while unsafe-text leakage stays at 52.6%.
-
Push Your Agent: Measuring and Enforcing Quantitative Goal Persistence in Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Introduces QGP and PushBench to evaluate LLM agent persistence on quantitative goals, showing specialized controllers outperform baselines on verifier-checked artifact collection tasks.
-
Boiling the Frog: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Agentic Safety
Boiling the Frog is a new stateful multi-turn benchmark that finds an aggregate 44.4% strict attack success rate for incremental safety violations across nine AI models, with rates ranging from 20.5% to 92.9%.
-
MemGym: a Long-Horizon Memory Environment for LLM Agents
MemGym unifies agent gyms into a memory benchmark with isolated scoring across tool-use, research, coding, and computer-use regimes plus a lightweight reward model for tractable coding evaluation.
-
PrefBench: Evaluating Zero-Shot LLM Agents in Hidden-Preference Personalized Pricing Negotiations
PrefBench benchmark shows zero-shot LLMs achieve deal rates above 0.99 but seller profits only slightly above random and far below a simple concession heuristic across 7,500 episodes.
-
DecisionBench: A Benchmark for Emergent Delegation in Long-Horizon Agentic Workflows
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
-
SCICONVBENCH: Benchmarking LLMs on Multi-Turn Clarification for Task Formulation in Computational Science
SCICONVBENCH is a new benchmark evaluating LLMs on multi-turn disambiguation and inconsistency resolution for task formulation in computational science, with frontier models reaching only 52.7% success on fluid mechanics disambiguation cases.
-
$\pi$-Bench: Evaluating Proactive Personal Assistant Agents in Long-Horizon Workflows
π-Bench is a new benchmark for evaluating proactive personal assistant agents on 100 multi-turn tasks that include hidden intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity.
-
TRIAGE: Evaluating Prospective Metacognitive Control in LLMs under Resource Constraints
TRIAGE evaluates LLMs on prospective metacognitive control by requiring a single plan for task selection, sequencing, and token allocation under a calibrated budget, revealing substantial gaps in current models across math, science, code, and knowledge tasks.
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Do Androids Dream of Breaking the Game? Systematically Auditing AI Agent Benchmarks with BenchJack
BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
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Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance
ActGuide-RL uses human action data as plan-style guidance in mixed-policy RL to overcome exploration barriers in LLM agents, matching SFT+RL performance on search benchmarks without cold-start training.
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LLM Agents Already Know When to Call Tools -- Even Without Reasoning
LLM agents encode tool necessity in pre-generation hidden states with high linear decodability (AUROC 0.89-0.96); Probe&Prefill uses this to reduce tool calls 48% with 1.7% accuracy loss.
-
ProactBench: Beyond What The User Asked For
ProactBench measures LLM conversational proactivity in three phases using 198 multi-agent dialogues and finds recovery behavior hard to predict from existing benchmarks.
-
FORTIS: Benchmarking Over-Privilege in Agent Skills
FORTIS benchmark shows over-privilege is the norm in LLM agent skill selection and execution, with models reaching for higher-privilege skills and tools than required across ten frontier models and three domains.
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Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarification Timing Matter for Long-Horizon Agents?
Goal clarifications lose nearly all value after 10% of execution while input clarifications retain value until roughly 50%, and asking any type past mid-trajectory hurts performance more than never asking.
-
MASPrism: Lightweight Failure Attribution for Multi-Agent Systems Using Prefill-Stage Signals
MASPrism attributes failures in multi-agent systems by ranking candidates from prefill-stage NLL and attention signals of a 0.6B SLM, beating baselines by up to 33.41% Top-1 accuracy and proprietary LLMs by up to 89.5% relative improvement while processing traces in 2.66 seconds.
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Switchcraft: AI Model Router for Agentic Tool Calling
Switchcraft routes agentic tool-calling queries to the lowest-cost model that preserves correctness, reaching 82.9% accuracy and 84% cost reduction on five benchmarks.
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AcademiClaw: When Students Set Challenges for AI Agents
AcademiClaw is a new benchmark of 80 student-sourced academic tasks where the best frontier AI agents achieve only a 55% pass rate.
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Token Arena: A Continuous Benchmark Unifying Energy and Cognition in AI Inference
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Cutscene Agent: An LLM Agent Framework for Automated 3D Cutscene Generation
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AgentPulse: A Continuous Multi-Signal Framework for Evaluating AI Agents in Deployment
AgentPulse is a continuous multi-signal framework that scores AI agents on benchmark performance, adoption, sentiment and ecosystem health, showing these factors are complementary and that benchmark-plus-sentiment predicts external adoption metrics.
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ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents
ClawMark is a new benchmark for multi-turn multi-day multimodal coworker agents in stateful evolving services, with deterministic Python checkers showing frontier models achieve only 20% strict task success.
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AutomationBench
AutomationBench is a new benchmark for AI agents on cross-application REST API workflows where even top models score below 10%.
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HealthCraft: A Reinforcement Learning Safety Environment for Emergency Medicine
HealthCraft is the first public RL safety environment for emergency medicine that evaluates frontier LLMs on trajectory-level safety with a dual-layer rubric, showing low multi-step performance and high safety failure rates.
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Evaluating Tool-Using Language Agents: Judge Reliability, Propagation Cascades, and Runtime Mitigation in AgentProp-Bench
AgentProp-Bench shows substring judging agrees with humans at kappa=0.049, LLM ensemble at 0.432, bad-parameter injection propagates with ~0.62 probability, rejection and recovery are independent, and a runtime fix cuts hallucinations 23pp on GPT-4o-mini but not Gemini-2.0-Flash.
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PRIME: Training Free Proactive Reasoning via Iterative Memory Evolution for User-Centric Agent
PRIME enables agents to proactively reason in user-centric tasks by iteratively evolving structured memories from interaction trajectories without gradient-based training.
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RealUserSim: Bridging the Reality Gap in Agent Benchmarking via Grounded User Simulation
RealUserSim grounds LLM simulators in 7,275 executable profiles from real conversations, raising behavioral match rates from 24.2% to 45.3% and revealing agent failures hidden by cooperative simulators.
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Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Calling Agents with Iterative Reward Calibration
Iterative Reward Calibration with MT-GRPO and GTPO enables effective multi-turn RL for tool-calling agents, raising Tau-Bench success from 63.8% to 66.7% for a 4B model and from 58.0% to 69.5% for a 30B model.
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Agent-Diff: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Enterprise API Tasks via Code Execution with State-Diff-Based Evaluation
Agent-Diff benchmarks LLM agents on enterprise API tasks using code execution and state-diff contracts to define success, evaluated on nine models across 224 tasks with code released.
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$\tau^2$-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment
τ²-bench provides a Dec-POMDP-based telecom domain with compositional task generation and a tool-constrained user simulator to measure agent performance drops in dual-control versus single-control settings.
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SciVisAgentSkills: Design and Evaluation of Agent Skills for Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization
SciVisAgentSkills provides reusable agent skills that raise mean task scores on a 108-task SciVis benchmark when paired with Codex and Claude Code agents.
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Scaling Agentic Capabilities via Grounded Interaction Synthesis
GAIS synthesizes diverse, high-fidelity agentic tasks from real-world MCP servers and adversarial planning, outperforming LLM-only baselines on BFCL, τ²-Bench, and ACEBench with greater data efficiency.
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SynAE: A Framework for Measuring the Quality of Synthetic Data for Tool-Calling Agent Evaluations
SynAE is a multi-metric framework that evaluates how well synthetic benchmarks replicate real data characteristics for multi-turn tool-calling agent testing.
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Towards Direct Evaluation of Harness Optimizers via Priority Ranking
Priority ranking offers a low-cost direct evaluation for harness optimizers that correlates with their real multi-step optimization performance, supported by the Shor dataset of 182 scenarios.
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Open-World Evaluations for Measuring Frontier AI Capabilities
Open-world evaluations using qualitative review of real-world tasks can give earlier warnings of frontier AI capabilities than automated benchmarks, as demonstrated by an AI agent publishing a simple iOS app with one minor human fix.
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Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedback
DITTO uses RL with verbal feedback to train LLMs for human behavior simulation, reporting 36% average gains over base models and outperforming GPT-5.4 on 6 of 10 SOUL benchmark tasks.
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Firefly: Illuminating Large-Scale Verified Tool-Call Data Generation from Real APIs
FireFly inverts task synthesis by exploring real MCP servers first via pairwise tool graphs and sub-DAG sampling, then generates 5,144 verified tasks backward from outcomes to train a 4B model that matches Claude Sonnet 4.6 on tool-calling benchmarks.
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OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices
OpenJarvis decomposes personal AI into Intelligence, Engine, Agents, Tools & Memory, and Learning primitives and applies LLM-guided spec search to produce on-device configurations that reach within 3.2 pp of cloud baselines on average across eight tasks.
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CHI-Bench: Can AI Agents Automate End-to-End, Long-Horizon, Policy-Rich Healthcare Workflows?
CHI-Bench shows current AI agents achieve at most 28% success on long-horizon healthcare workflows that require dense policy adherence, multi-role handoffs, and multi-turn interactions.
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The Scaling Laws of Skills in LLM Agent Systems
Empirical analysis across 15 LLMs and 1,141 skills identifies a logarithmic routing decay law and a multiplicative execution law coupled by a single fitted slope parameter b that enables targeted library optimizations improving routing accuracy and downstream task pass rates.
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When Attention Closes: How LLMs Lose the Thread in Multi-Turn Interaction
Attention to goal tokens declines in multi-turn LLM interactions while residual representations often retain decodable goal information, and the gap between these predicts whether goal-conditioned behavior survives.
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GEAR: Granularity-Adaptive Advantage Reweighting for LLM Agents via Self-Distillation
GEAR adaptively reweights GRPO advantages in LLM RL by using divergence spikes from self-distillation to define semantic segments and modulate local credit.
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From Controlled to the Wild: Evaluation of Pentesting Agents for the Real-World
A practical evaluation protocol for AI pentesting agents that uses validated vulnerability discovery, LLM semantic matching, and bipartite scoring to assess performance in realistic, complex targets.
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ComplexMCP: Evaluation of LLM Agents in Dynamic, Interdependent, and Large-Scale Tool Sandbox
ComplexMCP benchmark shows top LLM agents achieve under 60% success on dynamic interdependent tool tasks versus 90% for humans, due to tool retrieval saturation, over-confidence, and strategic defeatism.