cs.AIMar 2, 2026

ASTRA-bench: Evaluating Tool-Use Agent Reasoning and Action Planning with Personal User Context

Authors: Zidi Xiu, David Q. Sun, Kevin Cheng, Maitrik Patel, Josh Date, Yizhe Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Omar Attia, 

Organizations: Apple

Abstract

Next-generation AI must manage vast personal data, diverse tools, and multi-step reasoning, yet most benchmarks remain context-free and single-turn. We present ASTRA-bench (Assistant Skills in Tool-use, Reasoning & Action-planning), a benchmark that uniquely unifies time-evolving personal context with an interactive toolbox and complex user intents. Our event-driven pipeline generates 2,413 scenarios across four protagonists, grounded in longitudinal life events and annotated by referential, functional, and informational complexity. Evaluation of state-of-the-art models (e.g., Claude-4.5-Opus, DeepSeek-V3.2) reveals significant performance degradation under high-complexity conditions, with argument generation emerging as the primary bottleneck. These findings expose critical limitations in current agents' ability to ground reasoning within messy personal context and orchestrate reliable multi-step plans. We release ASTRA-bench with a full execution environment and evaluation scripts to provide a diagnostic testbed for developing truly context-aware AI assistants.

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