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ScrambleToolBench: Agents Search Exhaustively Even When Their Own Map Points to the Next Step

Research LLM Agents

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Merged summary

TL;DR - ScrambleToolBench is an interactive terminal benchmark that strips semantic tool schemas away, forcing agents to discover hidden tool behavior purely through trial-and-error interaction. It matters because it shows frontier LLM agents can make initial discoveries but fail to adapt deductively when the environment shifts.

  • Removes semantic cues and uses a continuous task curriculum so agents cannot lean on prior knowledge; behavior must be inferred from interaction alone.
  • Adds dynamic stressors — mapping drift, stochastic action failures, and temporal execution windows — to test hypothesis revision as the environment changes.
  • Under structural change, agents show belief inertia or revert to exhaustive search instead of deductive strategies like cycle tracing.
  • Scaling test-time reasoning amplifies brute-force search rather than enabling deduction; persistent memory cuts compounding errors but still doesn't yield efficient structural inference.

Sources (1)

ScrambleToolBench: Agents Search Exhaustively Even When Their Own Map Points to the Next Step

arXiv cs.CL Vernon Toh, Navonil Majumder, Zhengyuan Liu, Nancy F. Chen, Soujanya Poria 2026-08-03 arXiv:2608.02358
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 11
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 11 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-03 14:33:48.706982 UTC

TL;DR - ScrambleToolBench is an interactive terminal benchmark that strips semantic tool schemas away, forcing agents to discover hidden tool behavior purely through trial-and-error interaction. It matters because it shows frontier LLM agents can make initial discoveries but fail to adapt deductively when the environment shifts.

  • Removes semantic cues and uses a continuous task curriculum so agents cannot lean on prior knowledge; behavior must be inferred from interaction alone.
  • Adds dynamic stressors — mapping drift, stochastic action failures, and temporal execution windows — to test hypothesis revision as the environment changes.
  • Under structural change, agents show belief inertia or revert to exhaustive search instead of deductive strategies like cycle tracing.
  • Scaling test-time reasoning amplifies brute-force search rather than enabling deduction; persistent memory cuts compounding errors but still doesn't yield efficient structural inference.
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