Benchmarking LLM Tool-Use in the Wild

Peijie Yu, Wei Liu, Yifan Yang, Jinjian Li, Zelong Zhang, Xiao Feng, feng zhang

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Fulfilling user needs through Large Language Model multi-turn, multi-step tool-use is rarely a straightforward process. Real user interactions are inherently $\textbf{wild}$, being intricate, messy, and flexible. We identify three key challenges from user behaviour: $\textit{compositional tasks}$ that demand efficient orchestration of tool-call topologies, $\textit{implicit intent}$ spread across dialogue turns that require contextual inference, and $\textit{instruction transition}$, which mixes task queries, clarifications, and casual conversation, forcing LLMs to adjust their policies on the fly. Existing benchmarks overlook these behaviors, making the apparent progress of LLMs on tool-use spurious. To address this, we introduce $\textbf{\textit{WildToolBench}}$, an LLM tool-use benchmark grounded in real-world user behavior patterns. Comprehensive evaluations of 57 LLMs reveal that no model achieves an accuracy of more than 15\%, indicating a substantial gap in the robustness of LLMs' agentic ability. Controlled experiments and in-depth analyses further indicate that the real challenge for LLM tool-use lies not in artificially complex tasks, but in the wild nature of user behavior, emphasizing the need to reconsider the interactions among $\textit{LLMs}$, $\textit{users}$, and $\textit{tools}$.