As Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers emerge as the core infrastructure for connecting LLMs with external tools, existing benchmarks leverage real-world MCP servers to evaluate LLM agents' tool-using capabilities. However, these benchmarks overlook the continuous evolution of tool interfaces and functionalities within MCP servers, resulting in flawed assessments that fail to capture the agent's adaptability in changing tool landscapes. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{MCPEvol-Bench}, a novel benchmark for evaluating the task-solving capabilities of LLM agents under dynamic toolset evolution. Inspired by large-scale empirical study, we propose 11 mutation operators to simulate realistic tool evolution within 123 MCP servers. We benchmark 12 state-of-the-art LLMs on multiple versions of MCP servers, revealing that even frontier models struggle to adapt to evolving tools. For instance, GPT-5.4 and Claude-Sonnet-4-6 exhibit performance declines of 13.7\% and 14.4\% in evolved MCP servers, respectively, accompanied by substantial increases in planning and reasoning errors. These findings highlight the vulnerability of LLM-driven workflows, establishing MCPEvol-Bench as a standard for evaluating agent adaptability in dynamic tool environments.
Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Asim Munawar, Kinjal Basu +4cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Training LLMs to orchestrate multi-step tool calls is held back by three coupled obstacles: realistic stateful execution environments are costly to build, synthetic training queries are often detached from the server's actual state (so the generated tool calls fail to execute), and recall-based RL rewards incentivize verbose tool-calling patterns. We present PROVE (Programmatic Rewards On Verified Environments), a framework with three contributions: (1) a library of 20 stateful MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers exposing 343 tools, enabling live-execution RL training with session-scoped state isolation; (2) a state-machine data synthesis pipeline that generates multi-turn tool-call trajectories grounded in live-sampled server state, so generated queries reference entities that actually exist; and (3) a multi-component programmatic reward with an adaptive efficiency penalty that counters the verbosity incentive of recall-based rewards. We train four models (Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Granite-4.1-8B) with GRPO on the resulting ~13K training examples. On BFCL Multi-Turn, tau2-bench, and T-Eval, PROVE yields improvements of up to +10.2, +6.8, and +6.5 points respectively, demonstrating that this framework yields consistent gains on multi-step tool orchestration across two model families.
General agentic intelligence hinges on the ability to interact with diverse real-world tools to complete complex tasks, a capability fundamentally tied to the quality of interaction data. To bypass the prohibitive costs of human annotation, prevailing paradigms depend entirely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to scale the synthesis of agentic environments and tasks. However, such unconstrained generation often degenerates into biased random sampling of LLMs' internal priors, failing to capture the diversity and difficulty of real-world domains or construct high-fidelity, long-horizon tasks. In this work, we introduce Grounded Agentic Interaction Synthesis (GAIS), a framework that automates the scalable construction of diverse environments and complex tasks via a two-phase grounding mechanism. Specifically, we construct protocol-anchored environments derived from real-world Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to ensure functional diversity and difficulty. Subsequently, we employ structure-guided planning to navigate these environments, actively enforcing logical dependencies and adversarial policies to generate complex tasks. Experiments on BFCL, $τ^2$-Bench, and ACEBench demonstrate that GAIS-synthesized data significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, enabling base models to match or even surpass their official instruction-tuned counterparts. Furthermore, GAIS exhibits superior data efficiency and scalability, achieving exceptional capabilities with significantly less data while maintaining continuous growth where baselines stagnate. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Eric8932/GAIS.