SPRING-5: Measuring Tool Documentation Repair for LLM Agents by Efficiency

Guan Zheng Huang

Methods that repair tool documentation automatically are mostly evaluated on task accuracy. We report a benchmark that scores them on cost. SPRING-5 is 20 tool families and 344 tasks, each with a deliberately degraded specification, a hand-written honest one, a deterministic backend and an answer key, scored on calls charged against the ideal call path. A wrong answer is charged the full call budget, so this cost index largely tracks the completion rate, and we report calls per correct task beside it, which carries no such charge. Over 2,644 baseline sessions, 54% of wrong answers arrive with no rejected call, no refusal and no retry. The benchmark carries three validity instruments. A build-time ceiling assertion requires the honest specification to reach the ideal path and fails systematically on only one family. A dud rule names the families a stronger model solves cold and catches four. A directly measured noise floor shows that two evaluations of a byte-identical specification differ by a 95% factor of 0.64 to 1.56, so about one comparison in eight crosses a conventional win threshold on noise alone, and the cheap way of estimating that floor is biased by which families…