Robustness Analysis of Agentic AI to Inconsistent and Incomplete Tool Responses
TL;DR
The results show that tool failures can be recognized at the return boundary, but reliable diagnosis requires combining multiple signals, and likelihood-based signals clearly capture incomplete returns and some direct inconsistencies, while action-based signals reveal how strongly a failure changes the next decision.
Abstract
Tool-using agents increasingly rely on external tools to complete multi-step tasks, but tool returns can fail in different ways and require different recovery actions. Existing robustness studies often use uncertainty-based measures to detect when an agent becomes unreliable. These measures can reveal that something has gone wrong, but they do not directly identify the type of tool failure or the appropriate response. We address this limitation by analyzing tool failures at the moment a return enters the agent context. Our approach combines two complementary signals. The first compares the likelihood of the returned content under the tool schema and under the full trajectory prefix. The second measures the agent's probability distribution over its legal next actions. We evaluate the approach by injecting incomplete and inconsistent returns into a retail customer-service benchmark. The results show that likelihood-based signals clearly capture incomplete returns and some direct inconsistencies, while action-based signals reveal how strongly a failure changes the next decision. Some failures that are weak under likelihood signals can still redirect the agent toward state-changing actions. These findings show that tool failures can be recognized at the return boundary, but reliable diagnosis requires combining multiple signals.
