The World Won't Stay Still: Programmable Evolution for Agent Benchmarks
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
Other references · 22
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- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,197
- 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
10 more
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- 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 773
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- 2024SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?cited by 196
- 2024LitLLM: A Toolkit for Scientific Literature Reviewcited by 61
- 2025TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Taskscited by 46
- 2025AgentSynth: Scalable Task Generation for Generalist Computer-Use Agentscited by 41
- 2024AutoBencher: Towards Declarative Benchmark Constructioncited by 40
- 2025AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learningcited by 18
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
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- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
- 2026Scoped Verification for Reliable Long-Horizon Agentic Context Evolution under Distribution Shiftcited by 1
- 2026MirrorCraft: Paired Evaluation under Hidden Rule Changes in Minecraftcited by 1
- 2026MirrorCraft: Paired Evaluation under Hidden Rule Changes in Minecraft31 Jul 2026
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries11 Jul 2026
- 2026Scoped Verification for Reliable Long-Horizon Agentic Context Evolution under Distribution Shift10 Jul 2026
- 2026The Interplay of Harness Design and Post-Training in LLM Agents24 Jun 2026
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