Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

NESTFUL: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Nested Sequences of API Calls

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2409.03797 v3 pith:47UA5CMU submitted 2024-09-04 cs.AI cs.CL

classification cs.AIcs.CL
keywords nestednestfulllmssequencesbenchmarkcallingcallsfunction
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

The resurgence of autonomous agents built using large language models (LLMs) to solve complex real-world tasks has brought increased focus on LLMs' fundamental ability of tool or function calling. At the core of these agents, an LLM must plan, execute, and respond using external tools, APIs, and custom functions. Research on tool calling has gathered momentum, but evaluation benchmarks and datasets representing the complexity of the tasks have lagged behind. In this work, we focus on one such complexity, nested sequencing, with the goal of extending existing benchmarks and evaluation. Specifically, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL contains 1800+ nested sequences where all the function calls are executable. Experimental results on a variety of models show that the best-performing model (GPT-4o) achieves a full sequence match accuracy of 28% and a win-rate of 60%, necessitating a large scope for improvement in the nested sequencing aspect of function calling. Our analysis of these results provides possible future research directions for the community, in addition to a benchmark to track progress. We have released the NESTFUL dataset under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/IBM/NESTFUL.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. ToolPRM: Fine-Grained Inference Scaling of Structured Outputs for Function Calling

    cs.AI 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    ToolPRM provides fine-grained intra-call process supervision via a new dataset and reward model, outperforming outcome and coarse-grained alternatives on function-calling benchmarks.

  2. Synthesize and Reward -- Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Step Tool Use in Live Environments

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    PROVE trains LLMs on multi-step tool calls using 20 live MCP servers with 343 tools, state-grounded synthesis, and adaptive efficiency rewards, delivering gains of up to 10.2 points on BFCL Multi-Turn and similar on o...

  3. RAG Strategies for Natural Language-Based SQL Query and REST API Call Generation

    cs.SE 2026-02 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    In a 631-case enterprise benchmark, iterative retrieval (CoRAG) achieved 10.29% exact match vs 7.45% for standard RAG on combined SQL/API generation with hybrid documentation, while no-RAG gives 0% exact match.

  4. How Can Input Reformulation Improve Tool Usage Accuracy in a Complex Dynamic Environment? A Study on $\tau$-bench

    cs.CL 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    IRMA reformulates tool-agent inputs with memory, domain constraints, and tool suggestions, and reports improved tau-bench pass^5 reliability over ReAct, function calling, and self-reflection.

  5. A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 accept novelty 4.0 of 10

    The survey organizes Context Engineering into retrieval, processing, management, and integrated systems like RAG and multi-agent setups while identifying an asymmetry where LLMs handle complex inputs well but struggle...

Pith tools