mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

One Readout, Many Repairs: Diffusion-Guided Hierarchical Search for Tool-Agent Repair

arXiv 2609.34879 ↗First posted 28 Sep 2026cs.AI cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Tool learning and function calling also fits: Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Tool agents use large language models to act through external tools, yet successfully executed calls can still leave user requests unfulfilled. Tool-agent repair seeks alternative call sequences that execute successfully and fulfill the original requests. However, repair requires exploring both operation choices and their concrete realizations, making complete-sequence regeneration costly. Moreover, regeneration repeats operation selection even when failure arises from how those operations are realized. The resulting challenge is to reduce this repetition while preserving exploration of alternative operations and realizations. Therefore, we formulate repair as hierarchical search over operation supports, which we introduce as sets of permitted operation types that define reusable search regions for concrete tool-call sequences. We propose ReCommit, a training-free, diffusion-guided framework for improving tool-agent failure recovery while reducing repair computation. ReCommit amortizes operation-level proposal computation across repair trials by reusing operation-type scores from a single parallel readout of a masked diffusion language model. These scores guide search across supports, while realization search explores alternative entity bindings, arguments, and action composition within each support. Experiments on real failures across four enterprise services in the Agent-Diff benchmark show 75.9% and 63.2% relative recovery gains with 61.3% and 51.3% reductions in mean full-budget repair time at repair budgets B=3 and B=13, respectively, over the strongest evaluated 8B comparison method. ReCommit achieves a favorable recovery--cost trade-off, including in comparisons with the evaluated 32B models.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 32 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

Builds on

32 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Beyond Function Calling: Benchmarking Tool-Using Agents under Tool-Environment Unreliability24 Jun
  2. 2026When Tools Fail: Benchmarking Dynamic Replanning and Anomaly Recovery in LLM Agents4 Jun
  3. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs31 Jul
  4. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs24 May
  5. 2023ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddings19 May
  6. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs14 Apr
  7. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools9 Feb

Other references · 25

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  3. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  4. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
  5. 2021Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spacescited by 1,665
  6. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
  7. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  8. 2025Large Language Diffusion Modelscited by 872
  9. 2024Simple and Effective Masked Diffusion Language Modelscited by 800
  10. 2023CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquingcited by 751
  11. 2023Discrete Diffusion Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distributioncited by 712
  12. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
13 more
  1. 2023Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Modelscited by 551
  2. 2023Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Modelscited by 550
  3. 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 537
  4. 2025Dream 7B: Diffusion Large Language Modelscited by 515
  5. 2024AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agentscited by 359
  6. 2025LLaDA 1.5: Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization for Large Language Diffusion Modelscited by 273
  7. 2025DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generationcited by 184
  8. 2025Where LLM Agents Fail and How They can Learn From Failurescited by 118
  9. 2025SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generationcited by 118
  10. 2026Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decodingcited by 19
  11. 2026Agent-Diff: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Enterprise API Tasks via Code Execution with State-Diff-Based Evaluationcited by 12
  12. 2026The Bitter Lesson of Diffusion Language Models for Agentic Workflows: A Comprehensive Reality Checkcited by 6
  13. 2026DiG-Plan: Mitigating Early Commitment for Tool-Graph Planning via Diffusion Guidancecited by 1

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  5. 2026ParaRecover: A Process-Level Benchmark for Error Localization and Recovery in Parallel Tool-Use Agents
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  7. 2026PhoenixRepair: Rethinking Repair Strategy Exploration in Software Agents
  8. 2026Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents