测试大模型在外部故障下自适应找替代方案的能力,发现多数模型难以应对突发失效。
Hell or High Water: Evaluating Agentic Recovery from External Failures
- 设计超4000个函数组合的规划基准,模拟任务中突然失效的外部依赖。
- 即使限制搜索空间,顶尖模型仍无法有效调整策略,失败率高达60%以上。
- 适合关注智能体鲁棒性、系统容错的开发者和研究者参考。
随着语言模型智能体被应用于日益复杂的现实问题,它们需在庞大的搜索空间中制定计划。当这些计划因不可控原因失败时,智能体能否有效寻找替代路径以达成目标?我们构建了一个专门的智能体规划基准来研究这一问题。每个规划任务通过函数调用组合解决,智能体需从四千多个候选函数中搜索相关函数,并根据函数输出或错误信息获取环境反馈。基准引入外部故障,如函数突然不可用,同时确保任务始终可解。理想情况下,外部故障不应影响任务完成。结果表明,语言模型智能体在响应环境反馈、制定备用计划方面表现不佳。尽管先进模型常能识别正确函数,但难以根据反馈调整行为,即便在人工限制搜索空间后仍频繁失败。我们对开源与商用模型进行了系统分析,考察了搜索空间大小及模型规模扩大的影响。分析揭示了当前生成模型的关键挑战,并指明未来研究方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As language model agents are applied to real world problems of increasing complexity, they will be expected to formulate plans across large search spaces. If those plans fail for reasons beyond their control, how well do language agents search for alternative ways to achieve their goals? We devise a specialized agentic planning benchmark to study this question. Each planning problem is solved via combinations of function calls. The agent searches for relevant functions from a set of over four thousand possibilities, and observes environmental feedback in the form of function outputs or error messages. Our benchmark confronts the agent with external failures in its workflow, such as functions that suddenly become unavailable. At the same time, even with the introduction of these failures, we guarantee that the task remains solvable. Ideally, an agent's performance on the planning task should not be affected by the presence of external failures. Overall, we find that language agents struggle to formulate and execute backup plans in response to environment feedback. While state-of-the-art models are often able to identify the correct function to use in the right context, they struggle to adapt to feedback from the environment and often fail to pursue alternate courses of action, even when the search space is artificially restricted. We provide a systematic analysis of the failures of both open-source and commercial models, examining the effects of search space size, as well as the benefits of scaling model size in our setting. Our analysis identifies key challenges for current generative models as well as promising directions for future work.
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