SAAG: Structured Agent Assessment and Grounding

Abstract:Exact-match evaluation of agent-calling obscures qualitatively different failure modes: a model may select the right function yet hallucinate argument values, or satisfy a schema while choosing a agent for the wrong reason. Existing benchmarks collapse these distinctions into a single binary score, leaving practitioners unable to diagnose where agent calls fail. We propose SAAG a cascaded diagnostic framework that decomposes agent-calling evaluation into three sequential stages: registry conformance, structural completeness, and argument grounding, each producing interpretable stage-specific diagnostics. These diagnostics additionally enable iterative self-repair: on prediction failure, the stage-specific signal guides targeted correction without leaking ground-truth values. We evaluate this framework on a controlled benchmark derived from Glaive's function-calling dataset across registry sizes of 5, 10, and 15 agents using three local sub-4B-parameter models. Structured feedback consistently improves argument precision and reduces value hallucination relative to single-pass inference and uninformative binary feedback, while end-to-end F1 gains are modest and model-dependent. These results suggest that stage-decomposed diagnostic evaluation is a necessary lens for understanding and improving agent-calling reliability across model families and registry scales.

Accepted to KnowFM @ ACL 2026 workshop (Non-Archival). 16 pages in total

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2607.18245 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2607.18245v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18245 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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