Paper Detail

VAKRA: Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning Across APIs and Retrieval Under Tool-Use Policies

Ankita Rajaram Naik, Anupama Murthi, Benjamin Elder, Siyu Huo, Raavi Gupta, Abhinav Jain, Praveen Venkateswaran, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Danish Contractor

arxiv Score 18.8

Published 2026-08-12 · First seen 2026-08-13

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Abstract

Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation. We introduce VAKRA (e\textbf{V}aluating \textbf{A}PI and \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{R}etrieval \textbf{A}gents), a benchmark of over $8{,}000$ executable APIs across $62$ domains with tasks spanning three settings of increasing difficulty: diverse API interaction styles, multi-hop reasoning over structured APIs, and multi-source reasoning with natural-language tool-use policy constraints. Correctness is verified by re-executing predicted tool calls against live APIs, accommodating multiple valid paths. Using a fixed ReAct harness to isolate model capabilities from agent architecture, we evaluate frontier and open-weight models and find that even the best model achieves only 70.4\% on single-hop endpoint-style tasks and drops to 50--51\% on compositional APIs; performance degrades by over 50\% as reasoning depth increases, and policy-constrained questions expose severe failures (as low as 2.4\% on unanswerable queries). Trace analysis shows failures concentrate at language-mediated reasoning - entity disambiguation, cross-source grounding, rather than tool invocation mechanics. Code is available https://github.com/IBM/VAKRA. Dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-research/VAKRA

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BibTeX

@article{naik2026vakra,
  title = {VAKRA: Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning Across APIs and Retrieval Under Tool-Use Policies},
  author = {Ankita Rajaram Naik and Anupama Murthi and Benjamin Elder and Siyu Huo and Raavi Gupta and Abhinav Jain and Praveen Venkateswaran and Abdulhamid Adebayo and Danish Contractor},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation. We introduce VAKRA (e\textbackslash{}textbf\{V\}aluating \textbackslash{}textbf\{A\}PI and \textbackslash{}textbf\{K\}nowledge \textbackslash{}textbf\{R\}etrieval \textbackslash{}textbf\{A\}gents), a benchmark of over \$8\{,\}000\$ executable APIs across \$62\$ domains with tasks spanning three settings of increasing difficulty: diverse API interaction styles, multi-hop reasoning over structured APIs, and multi-source rea},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12282},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2608.12282},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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