Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges

Abstract

Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use primarily focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, such as tool selection in a single turn, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. To fulfill this gap, we propose DialogTool, a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use, across six key tasks in three stages: 1) tool creation; 2) tool utilization: tool awareness, tool selection, tool execution; and 3) role-consistent response: response generation and role play. Furthermore, we build VirtualMobile - an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. Taking advantage of these artifacts, we conduct comprehensive evaluation on 13 distinct open- and closed-source LLMs and provide detailed analysis at each stage, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well to use tools over long horizons.