| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on the accuracy of tool calling and less on when LMs should (not) call tools. |
| Approach: | They develop a benchmark which evaluates tool-calling decision-making . they leverage multiple-choice nature of the benchmark to develop 'preference optimization' training regime . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that state-of-the-art LMs show room for improvement on When2Call. |
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Uncertainty Calibration for Tool-Using Language Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language agents are increasingly used to perform tasks and interact with a variety of external tools to achieve specific, goal-oriented objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool calibration tool called ProbeCal which recalibrates the internal probabilities of tool-using language agents to better reflect the actual effectiveness of tool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves off-the-shelf language models in tool-using applications. |
Lost in Execution: On the Multilingual Robustness of Tool Calling in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls. |
| Approach: | They introduce a diagnostic benchmark and conduct a systematic evaluation of multilingual tool calling across Chinese, Hindi, and the low-resource language Igbo. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that multilingual tool calling fails despite correct intent understanding and tool selection. |
ToolSpectrum: Towards Personalized Tool Utilization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on functional tool selection following user instructions while overlooking the critical role of context-aware personalization in tool selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ capabilities in personalized tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs' capabilities in personalized tool utilization. |
Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on tool use with LLMs focus on enhancing tool-calling ability of LLM . e.g., LLM should not answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions or insecure tool responses to ensure reliability and harmlessness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning and preference learning to align LLMs with H2A principle for tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that LLMs can generate truthful and helpful responses while remaining harmless. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
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Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yufei Wang, Yuanhao Xi, Jianqiao Lu, Huan Zhang, Nan Hu, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use across six key tasks in three stages . they also build VirtualMobile – an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates 13 open- and closed-source LLMs and provides detailed analysis at each stage. |
DICE-BENCH: Evaluating the Tool-Use Capabilities of Large Language Models in Multi-Round, Multi-Party Dialogues (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing function-calling benchmarks focus on single-turn interactions but ignore complexity of real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs practical function-calling datasets by synthesizing conversations through a tool graph that maintains dependencies across rounds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes conversations through a tool graph that maintains dependencies across rounds and a multi-agent system with distinct personas to enhance dialogue naturalness. |
Toolken+: Improving LLM Tool Usage with Reranking and a Reject Option (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using ToolkenGPT, tool learning paradigms lack flexibility and cannot generalize to unseen tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool learning paradigm that reranks top-k tools and generates a vocabulary token if REJECT is ranked first. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkenGPT model performs well on multistep numerical reasoning and tool selection tasks. |