{"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/t-bench-a-benchmark-for-tool-agent-user","title":"$τ$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains","arxiv_id":"2406.12045","date":"2024-06-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shunyu Yao","Noah Shinn","Pedram Razavi","Karthik Narasimhan"],"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12045v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12045v1.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":"t-bench-a-benchmark-for-tool-agent-user","repo_url":"https://github.com/sierra-research/tau-bench","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.12045","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}