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LiveMCPBench: Can Agents Navigate an Ocean of MCP Tools?

Guozhao Mo, Wenliang Zhong, Jiawei Chen, Qianhao Yuan, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun · Aug 3, 2025 · Citations: 0

Coding Llm As Judge Medicine Tool Use
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How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools. Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale retrieval and multi-tool composition. To bridge this gap, we propose LiveMCPBench, which evaluates 95 real-world daily tasks explicitly constructed to stress diverse tools and scaled multi-server routing. The benchmark includes a ready-to-deploy tool suite of 70 servers with 527 tools, ensuring reproducibility without scattered API configuration. We further introduce an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework that directly verifies task outcomes, handling dynamic data sources and multiple valid solution paths. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and observe a substantial performance gap: while Claude-Sonnet-4 reaches 78.95% task success, most models achieve only 30-50%. Our analysis reveals that the active tool composition strongly correlates with task success, whereas retrieval errors account for nearly half of all failures, highlighting retrieval as the dominant bottleneck. Together, these results provide the first large-scale, reproducible diagnosis of MCP agent capabilities and point towards future research on improving retrieval robustness and encouraging effective tool composition. Our code and data are publicly available at https://icip-cas.github.io/LiveMCPBench.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A benchmark-and-metrics comparison anchor.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

27/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 55%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Llm As Judge

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Livemcpbench, Retrieval

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale retrieval and multi-tool composition."

Reported Metrics

strong

Task success

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and observe a substantial performance gap: while Claude-Sonnet-4 reaches 78.95% task success, most models achieve only 30-50%."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Medicine, Coding

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Llm As Judge
  • Agentic eval: Tool Use
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

LivemcpbenchRetrieval

Reported Metrics

task success

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a key infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, scaling to 10,000+ MCP servers with diverse tools.
  • Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale retrieval and multi-tool composition.
  • To bridge this gap, we propose LiveMCPBench, which evaluates 95 real-world daily tasks explicitly constructed to stress diverse tools and scaled multi-server routing.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Tool-use evaluation) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale…
  • To bridge this gap, we propose LiveMCPBench, which evaluates 95 real-world daily tasks explicitly constructed to stress diverse tools and scaled multi-server routing.
  • We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and observe a substantial performance gap: while Claude-Sonnet-4 reaches 78.95% task success, most models achieve only 30-50%.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Unfortunately, there is still a large gap between real-world MCP usage and current evaluation: they typically assume single-server settings and directly inject tools into the model's context, bypassing the challenges of large-scale…
  • We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and observe a substantial performance gap: while Claude-Sonnet-4 reaches 78.95% task success, most models achieve only 30-50%.

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Llm As Judge

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Livemcpbench, Retrieval

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: task success

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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