{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/benchmarking-failures-in-tool-augmented","title":"Benchmarking Failures in Tool-Augmented Language Models","arxiv_id":"2503.14227","date":"2025-03-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Eduardo Treviño","Hugo Contant","James Ngai","Graham Neubig","Zora Zhiruo Wang"],"abstract":"The integration of tools has extended the capabilities of language models (LMs) beyond vanilla text generation to versatile scenarios. However, tool-augmented language models (TaLMs) often assume 'perfect' information access and tool availability, which may not hold in the real world. To systematically study TaLMs' imperfections, we introduce the FAIL-TALMS benchmark, featuring two major failures: under-specified user queries and non-available tools. FAIL-TALMS contains 1,749 examples using 906 tools across 21 categories, including single- and multi-tool usage. We evaluate top-performing proprietary and open-source models, and find all current models except for Claude struggle to recognize missing tools or information. Further, to study possible mitigation of the failures, we enable real-time human interaction, named the Ask-and-Help (AAH) method, to provide missing information or replace non-functional tools. While AAH can help models solve tasks more correctly when queries are under-specified, it brings minimal benefit when complex tools are broken.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14227v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14227v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"benchmarking-failures-in-tool-augmented","repo_url":"https://github.com/EduardoTrevino/fail-talms","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.14227","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}