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On Generalization in Agentic Tool Calling: CoreThink Agentic Reasoner and MAVEN Dataset

Artificial Intelligence 2025-10-28 v1 Software Engineering

Abstract

Generalization across Agentic tool-calling environments remains a key unsolved challenge in developing reliable agentic reasoning systems. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on isolated benchmarks, their ability to transfer reasoning strategies and co-ordinate tools across diverse domains is poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs on multiple tool-calling benchmarksBFCL v3, TauBench, Tau2Bench, and AceBenchand introduce MAVEN (Math & Physics Adversarial Verification & Evaluation Network), a new out of distribution (OOD) benchmark designed to stress-test multi-step reasoning through explicit verification and adversarial task composition. Our results show that most current models achieve below 50% accuracy on MAVEN, revealing a significant generalization gap across tool-use settings. To address this, we present the CoreThink Agentic Reasoner, a framework that augments LLMs with a lightweight symbolic reasoning layer for structured decomposition and adaptive tool orchestration. Without additional training, it generalizes across all benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 530% improvements over existing baselines at roughly one-tenth the computational cost.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.22898,
  title  = {On Generalization in Agentic Tool Calling: CoreThink Agentic Reasoner and MAVEN Dataset},
  author = {Vishvesh Bhat and Omkar Ghugarkar and Julian McAuley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.22898},
  year   = {2025}
}

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Preprint

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:06:55.524Z