mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

The World Won't Stay Still: Programmable Evolution for Agent Benchmarks

arXiv 2603.05910 ↗First posted 6 Mar 2026cs.AIcited by 4

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Tool learning and function calling

Abstract (arXiv)

LLM-powered tool-calling agents fulfill user requests by interacting with environments, querying data, and invoking tools in a multi-turn process. Yet, most existing benchmarks evaluate these systems under static environment interfaces, with fixed schemas and toolsets, making it difficult to assess how agents behave as environments evolves -- when capabilities are added, reorganized, or deprecated across successive environment versions. In this paper, we study structured environment evolution as a benchmark-construction problem for tool-calling agents. We propose ProEvolve, a graph-based framework that makes environment evolution programmable. At its core, a typed relational graph provides a unified, explicit representation of the environment - data, tools, and schema. Under this formalism, adding, removing, or modifying capabilities are expressed as graph transformations that coherently propagate updates across tools, schemas, and data access. Building on this, ProEvolve supports (1) automatic generation of evolved executable environments through explicit graph transformations, and (2) graph-grounded construction of task sandboxes via subgraph sampling and instantiation. We validate ProEvolve in two tool-calling domains, e-commerce and airline booking, in terms of quality, implementation validity, and failure modes. Finally, we use the generated benchmark as a downstream diagnostic to study how representative agents behave under structured environment evolution.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 23 of its 31 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

Builds on

23 of 31 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Learning Evolving Tools for Large Language Models9 Oct

Other references · 22

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  4. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  5. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  6. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  7. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
  8. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  9. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
  10. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,197
  11. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  12. 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
10 more
  1. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 910
  2. 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 773
  3. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
  4. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
  5. 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 196
  6. 2024LitLLM: A Toolkit for Scientific Literature Reviewcited by 61
  7. 2025TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Taskscited by 46
  8. 2025AgentSynth: Scalable Task Generation for Generalist Computer-Use Agentscited by 41
  9. 2024AutoBencher: Towards Declarative Benchmark Constructioncited by 40
  10. 2025AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learningcited by 18

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025SynthTools: A Framework for Scaling Synthetic Tools for Agent Development
  2. 2026Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents
  3. 2026E-Bench: Benchmarking Multi-Step Tool-Use Agents in Real-World Product Scenarios
  4. 2026MCPEvol-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agent Performance Across Dynamic Evolutions of MCP Servers
  5. 2026The Evolution of Tool Use in LLM Agents: From Single-Tool Call to Multi-Tool Orchestration
  6. 2026Self-Evolving Agents as Dynamic Graph Transformation: A Survey and New Perspective
  7. 2026PlanBench-XL: Evaluating Long-Horizon Planning of LLM Tool-Use Agents in Large-Scale Tool Ecosystems
  8. 2025AgentOrchestra: Orchestrating Multi-Agent Intelligence with the Tool-Environment-Agent(TEA) Protocol