AICLJun 21

PlanBench-XL: Evaluating Long-Horizon Planning of LLM Tool-Use Agents in Large-Scale Tool Ecosystems

arXiv:2606.2238822.4
Predicted impact top 13% in AI · last 90 daysOriginality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

For researchers building LLM tool-use agents, this benchmark reveals critical failures in long-horizon planning with large, imperfect tool ecosystems.

PlanBench-XL evaluates LLM agents on long-horizon planning with 1,665 tools, finding that even the best model (GPT-5.4) drops from 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings to 11.36% under severe blocking, highlighting challenges in adaptive planning.

LLM agents increasingly operate in large tool ecosystems, where real-world tasks require discovering relevant tools, inferring implicit sub-goals, and adapting to dynamic environments over long horizons. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks over 1,665 tools that tests whether agents can iteratively retrieve usable tools, invoke them to uncover intermediate evidence for subsequent calls toward the final goal. PlanBench-XL further features an optional blocking mechanism that simulates real-world unpredictability through missing, failing, or distracting tool functions, forcing agents to detect disrupted paths and adapt at runtime. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that massive-tool planning remains challenging: while GPT-5.4 achieves 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings, it collapses to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition. Further analysis shows that agents are especially vulnerable when failures lack explicit error signals or when recovery requires longer alternative tool-use paths. These results establish PlanBench-XL as a testbed for diagnosing agentic planning failures and highlight the need for robust adaptive planning in long-horizon tasks with large, imperfect tool environments.

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