Benchmarking LLM Tool-Use in the Wild

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission18997 Authors

Keywords: benchmarking, automatic evaluation of datasets, evaluation methodologies, evaluation, metrics, reproducibility, statistical testing for evaluation

TL;DR: WildToolBench reveals that what truly challenges LLM tool-use is not artificial complexity, but simple, realistic user behaviors.

Abstract: Fulfilling user needs through Large Language Model multi-turn, multi-step tool-use is rarely a straightforward process. Real user interactions are inherently $\textbf{wild}$, being intricate, messy, and flexible. We identify three key challenges from user behaviour: $\textit{compositional tasks}$ that demand efficient orchestration of tool-call topologies, $\textit{implicit intent}$ spread across dialogue turns that require contextual inference, and $\textit{instruction transition}$, which mixes task queries, clarifications, and casual conversation, forcing LLMs to adjust their policies on the fly. Existing benchmarks overlook these behaviors, making the apparent progress of LLMs on tool-use spurious. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{\textit{WildToolBench}}$, an LLM tool-use benchmark grounded in real-world user behavior patterns. Comprehensive evaluations of 57 LLMs reveal that no model achieves an accuracy of more than 15\%, indicating a substantial gap in the robustness of LLMs' agentic ability. Controlled experiments and in-depth analyses further indicate that the real challenge for LLM tool-use lies not in artificially complex tasks, but in the wild nature of user behavior, emphasizing the need to reconsider the interactions among $\textit{LLMs}$, $\textit{users}$, and $\textit{tools}$.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

Submission Number: 18997