mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Testing Agentic Workflows with Structural Coverage Criteria

arXiv 2605.26521 ↗First posted 26 May 2026cs.SEcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-agent systems increasingly expose explicit workflow structure: agents, tools, tool-access rules, restrictions, and delegation paths. Existing evaluations rely largely on end-to-end task success, benchmark scores, final-response quality, or prompt-level checks, which provide limited evidence that this declared coordination structure has actually been exercised. This makes it difficult to assess test-suite adequacy or detect structural regressions in tool access, restrictions, and inter-agent delegation. We address this gap with a structural testing approach for multi-agent workflow specifications. The approach represents each workflow as a typed coordination graph, derives coverage obligations over reachable agents, allowed tool edges, restricted tool edges, and delegation edges, and uses coverage-driven generation with DSPy-based scenario realization to produce executable tests. The graph fixes what must be covered; DSPy realizes those obligations as natural-language scenarios whose witnesses are checked at runtime. We implement the approach for OpenAI Agents SDK-style workflows and evaluate it on ten SDK-derived benchmarks comprising 49 reachable agents, 47 tools, and 403 structural obligations. Generated scenarios witness 54/75 allowed-tool obligations and 36/48 delegation obligations within a bounded refinement budget. The adversarial restricted-tool criterion elicits 23/248 restricted-call violations, separating workflows whose restrictions hold under probing from workflows with concrete misrouting failures. These results show that structural coverage provides a useful adequacy layer for multi-agent workflow testing: it does not replace semantic or end-to-end evaluation, but reveals whether declared agents, tool-access rules, restrictions, and delegation paths have been exercised.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 May 2026.

Builds on

11 of 20 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation16 Aug

Other references · 10

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,373
  3. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  4. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,947
  5. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,439
  6. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,267
  7. 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
  8. 2020Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckListcited by 1,006
  9. 2023DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelinescited by 832
  10. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 591

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

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