mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Do Agents Know What They Can't Do? Evaluating Feasibility Awareness in Tool-Using Agents

arXiv 2605.28532 ↗First posted 27 May 2026cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

Abstract (arXiv)

Tool-using agents often incur substantial computational cost due to long reasoning chains and iterative tool usage. In practical scenarios, many tasks become infeasible under constrained tool environments, where the capabilities required for successful task completion are unavailable. Detecting infeasible tasks and stopping execution early can significantly reduce unnecessary execution cost. In this work, we propose FeasiGen, an automatic pipeline for constructing infeasible agent tasks by identifying the critical tools required for successful task completion. Our approach extracts tool-calling traces from successful executions across multiple agent systems, identifies critical tools consistently shared across diverse execution strategies, and masks these tools to automatically transform solvable tasks into infeasible ones. Human verification confirms that the infeasibility annotations for our constructed tasks achieve over 94% accuracy. We further introduce feasibility-aware evaluation metrics for measuring whether agents can recognize infeasible tasks and stop execution appropriately. Extensive evaluations across nine models reveal substantially weak infeasibility detection ability, with false continue rate reaching up to 73.9%. We further observe that multi-agent architectures significantly reduce erroneous execution under infeasible conditions.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 17 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

Builds on

17 of 34 references.

References · 17

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  3. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  4. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  5. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
  6. 2019Invariant Risk Minimizationcited by 1,832
  7. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,302
  8. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  9. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,210
  10. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  11. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 574
  12. 2015Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervalscited by 533
5 more
  1. 2023Proving Test Set Contamination in Black Box Language Modelscited by 227
  2. 2023Rethinking Benchmark and Contamination for Language Models with Rephrased Samplescited by 192
  3. 2025Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself: Selectively Quitting Improves LLM Agent Safetycited by 12
  4. 2024Can Tool-augmented Large Language Models be Aware of Incomplete Conditions?cited by 8
  5. 2025DICE-BENCH: Evaluating the Tool-Use Capabilities of Large Language Models in Multi-Round, Multi-Party Dialoguescited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?
  2. 2026Do AI Agents Know When a Task Is Simple? Toward Complexity-Aware Reasoning and Execution
  3. 2026ParaRecover: A Process-Level Benchmark for Error Localization and Recovery in Parallel Tool-Use Agents
  4. 2026Callability Is Not Operability: Controlled Interface Interventions for LLM Agents
  5. 2026AgentEscapeBench: Evaluating Out-of-Domain Tool-Grounded Reasoning in LLM Agents
  6. 2026Beyond Function Calling: Benchmarking Tool-Using Agents under Tool-Environment Unreliability
  7. 2026ChromaFlow: A Negative Ablation Study of Orchestration Overhead in Tool-Augmented Agent Evaluation
  8. 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications