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The Tool Decathlon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Diverse, Realistic, and Long-Horizon Task Execution

Junlong Li, Wenshuo Zhao, Jian Zhao, Weihao Zeng, Haoze Wu, Xiaochen Wang, Rui Ge, Yuxuan Cao, Yuzhen Huang, Wei Liu, Junteng Liu, Zhaochen Su, Yiyang Guo, Fan Zhou, Lueyang Zhang, Juan Michelini, Xingyao Wang, Xiang Yue, Shuyan Zhou, Graham Neubig, Junxian He · Oct 29, 2025 · Citations: 0

How to use this paper page

Coverage: Stale

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Best use

Background context only

Metadata: Stale

Trust level

Moderate

Signals: Stale

What still needs checking

No major weakness surfaced.

Signal confidence: 0.55

Abstract

Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps. For instance, an agent may manage emails by coordinating with calendars and file systems, or monitor a production database to detect anomalies and generate reports following an operating manual. However, existing language agent benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or simplified tasks that lack the diversity, realism, and long-horizon complexity required to evaluate agents' real-world performance. To address this gap, we introduce the Tool Decathlon (dubbed as Toolathlon), a benchmark for language agents offering diverse Apps and tools, realistic environment setup, and reliable execution-based evaluation. Toolathlon spans 32 software applications and 604 tools, ranging from everyday platforms such as Google Calendar and Notion to professional ones like WooCommerce, Kubernetes, and BigQuery. Most of the tools are based on a high-quality set of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that we may have revised or implemented ourselves. Unlike prior works, which primarily ensure functional realism but offer limited environment state diversity, we provide realistic initial environment states from real software, such as Canvas courses with dozens of students or real financial spreadsheets. This benchmark includes 108 manually sourced or crafted tasks in total, requiring interacting with multiple Apps over around 20 turns on average to complete. Each task is strictly verifiable through dedicated evaluation scripts. Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp reaches 20.1%. We expect Toolathlon to drive the development of more capable language agents for real-world, long-horizon task execution.

HFEPX Relevance Assessment

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

Eval-Fit Score

25/100 • Low

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

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

HFEPX Fit

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence: Moderate

What This Page Found In The Paper

Each field below shows whether the signal looked explicit, partial, or missing in the available metadata. Use this to judge what is safe to trust directly and what still needs full-paper validation.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

Evidence snippet: Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Includes extracted eval setup.

Evidence snippet: Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit QC controls found.

Evidence snippet: Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

APPS

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

Evidence snippet: Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

Reported Metrics

strong

Success rate

Confidence: Moderate Direct evidence

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Evidence snippet: Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp reaches 20.1%.

Rater Population

missing

Unknown

Confidence: Low Not found

Rater source not explicitly reported.

Evidence snippet: Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: General
  • Signal basis: Structured extraction plus abstract evidence.

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: Long Horizon
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Signal confidence: 0.55
  • Known cautions: ambiguous

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

APPS

Reported Metrics

success rate

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.

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

Key Takeaways

  • Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.
  • For instance, an agent may manage emails by coordinating with calendars and file systems, or monitor a production database to detect anomalies and generate reports following an operating manual.
  • However, existing language agent benchmarks often focus on narrow domains or simplified tasks that lack the diversity, realism, and long-horizon complexity required to evaluate agents' real-world performance.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Simulation environment, Long-horizon tasks) 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

  • Real-world language agents must handle complex, multi-step workflows across diverse Apps.
  • To address this gap, we introduce the Tool Decathlon (dubbed as Toolathlon), a benchmark for language agents offering diverse Apps and tools, realistic environment setup, and reliable execution-based evaluation.
  • Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • To address this gap, we introduce the Tool Decathlon (dubbed as Toolathlon), a benchmark for language agents offering diverse Apps and tools, realistic environment setup, and reliable execution-based evaluation.
  • Comprehensive evaluation of SOTA models highlights their significant shortcomings: the best-performing model, Claude-4.5-Sonnet, achieves only a 38.6% success rate with 20.2 tool calling turns on average, while the top open-weights model…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: APPS

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: success rate

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

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