mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Drift-Bench: Diagnosing Cooperative Breakdowns in LLM Agents under Input Faults via Multi-Turn Interaction

arXiv 2602.02455 ↗First posted 2 Feb 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.SEcited by 7

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

As Large Language Models transition to autonomous agents, user inputs frequently violate cooperative assumptions (e.g., implicit intent, missing parameters, false presuppositions, or ambiguous expressions), creating execution risks that text-only evaluations do not capture. Existing benchmarks typically assume well-specified instructions or restrict evaluation to text-only, single-turn clarification, and thus do not measure multi-turn disambiguation under grounded execution risk. We introduce Drift-Bench, the first diagnostic benchmark that evaluates agentic pragmatics under input faults through multi-turn clarification across state-oriented and service-oriented execution environments. Grounded in classical theories of communication, Drift-Bench provides a unified taxonomy of cooperative breakdowns and employs a persona-driven user simulator with the Rise evaluation protocol. Experiments show substantial performance drops under these faults, with clarification effectiveness varying across user personas and fault types. MethodName bridges clarification research and agent safety evaluation, enabling systematic diagnosis of failures that can lead to unsafe executions.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

Builds on

14 of 49 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment22 Apr

Other references · 13

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  3. 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
  4. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  5. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
  6. 2025UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agentscited by 69
  7. 2025AgentRouter: A Knowledge-Graph-Guided LLM Router for Collaborative Multi-Agent Question Answeringcited by 29
  8. 2023Sources of Uncertainty in Supervised Machine Learning -- A Statisticians' Viewcited by 27
  9. 2025AutoData: A Multi-Agent System for Open Web Data Collectioncited by 25
  10. 2025CondAmbigQA: A Benchmark and Dataset for Conditional Ambiguous Question Answeringcited by 15
  11. 2025MAPRO: Recasting Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization as Maximum a Posteriori Inferencecited by 15
  12. 2025ClarifyMT-Bench: Benchmarking and Improving Multi-Turn Clarification for Conversational Large Language Modelscited by 12
1 more
  1. 2025LLMs4All: A Review of Large Language Models Across Academic Disciplinescited by 11

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

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  1. 2026MAS-FIRE: Fault Injection and Reliability Evaluation for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems
  2. 2026When Users Change Their Minds: Measuring and Repairing Intent Drift in LLM Agents
  3. 2026Beyond the Leaderboard: A Synthesis of Tool-Use, Planning, and Reasoning Failures in Large Language Model Agents
  4. 2026AgentCompass: A Unified Evaluation Infrastructure for Agent Capabilities
  5. 2026PASTABench: Proactive Assessment of Sequential Trajectories for Agent Safety
  6. 2026AgentBoundary: Counterfactual Evaluation of Safety in Tool-Using LLM Agents
  7. 2026Operational Hallucination and Safety Drift in AI Agents
  8. 2026AgentPerfBench: A Benchmarking and Evaluation Suite for Inference Performance of Agentic LLMs