ACL Findings2026
Do LLMs Catch Their Own Mistakes? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Reflective Tool Use LLMs
Zheyuan Liu, Liqiang Xiao, Yang Li, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li, Chao Zhang, Meng Jiang
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools to complete complex tasks, yet their ability to recognize and correct their own tool-use mistakes remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate planning and execution success, overlooking the self-reflective dimension of tool use. To address this gap, we present ReflecTool-Bench, the first benchmark designed to assess LLMs' self-reflective reasoning in toolaugmented multi-turn dialogues. ReflecTool-Bench covers 10 domains with 88 distinct APIs and 968 annotated dialogues, systematically injecting diverse error types arising from both user and assistant behavior. The benchmark defines two complementary evaluation setups: the Critique task, where models diagnose errors in third-party dialogues, and the Self-Reflection Task, where models must detect and repair their own prior tool-use mistakes. We introduce fine-grained metrics for error detection, error classification, correction accuracy, and explanation quality, enabling a holistic assessment of reflective reasoning. Evaluations across 12 state-of-the-art models, including both API-based closed source models and open-source models, reveal that while models can reliably identify user-originated errors, they struggle with assistant-originated ones, and performance drops sharply when moving from critique to self-reflection. 2
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Builds on21
- Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use ToolsTimo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì, Roberta Raileanu et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 5,989 citations
- Reflexion: language agents with verbal reinforcement learningNoah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 5,828 citations
- Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-ReflectionAkari Asai, Zeqiu Wu, Yizhong Wang, Avirup Sil et al.ICLR 2024 · 1,798 citations
- Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIsShishir G. Patil, Tianjun Zhang, Xin Wang, Joseph E. GonzalezNeurIPS 2024 · 1,715 citations
- Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent DebateYilun Du, Shuang Li, Antonio Torralba, Joshua B. Tenenbaum et al.ICML 2024 · 1,562 citations
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