ASTRA-bench: Evaluating Tool-Use Agent Reasoning and Action Planning with Personal User Context
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.
Figures & tables
| Count | Scenarios Count | Domain Context Count | |||||||
| Events | User Goals | Scenarios | Contact | Calendar | Message | Phone call | |||
| Total | 111 | 1360 | 2413 | 69 | 115 | 84 | 309 | 30 | 15 |
| Category | Model Variants & Citations |
| Proprietary | GPT-o3, GPT-4.1 ( Hurst et al., 2024 ) ; Claude-4.5-Opus, Claude-4.5-Haiku ( Anthropic, 2024 ) |
| Open-source | DeepSeek-v3.2 ( Liu et al., 2025 ) ; Qwen3 (30B-A3B, 30B-A3B-Inst., 235B-A22B) ( Bai et al., 2023 ) |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Protagonist | Scenarios Count | Domain Context Count | |||||||
| Events | User Goals | Scenarios | Contact | Calendar | Message | Phone call | |||
| Dawei Shen | 21 | 222 | 394 | 17 | 13 | 17 | 26 | 14 | 3 |
| Theo Appleseed | 27 | 366 | 592 | 11 | 32 | 9 | 84 | 0 | 4 |
| John Quinn | 21 | 309 | 535 | 15 | 27 | 22 | 100 | 0 | 4 |
| Emily Rose | 21 | 203 | 384 | 10 | 17 | 25 | 31 | 6 | 2 |
| Lucas Garcia | 21 | 260 | 508 | 16 | 26 | 11 | 68 | 10 | 2 |
| informational_complexity | referential_complexity | functional_complexity | count | percentage |
| Moderate | Moderate | Low | 693 | 0.287 |
| Moderate | Moderate | Moderate | 308 | 0.128 |
| Low | Moderate | Moderate | 242 | 0.100 |
| High | Moderate | Low | 186 | 0.077 |
| Low | Moderate | Low | 145 | 0.060 |
| Low | Low | Low | 133 | 0.055 |
| N | Task Completion | No Hallucination | |||||||
| Model | Challenge | No Challenge | With Challenge | No Challenge | With Challenge | Impact ( ) | No Challenge | With Challenge | Impact ( ) |
| GPT-o3 | Insufficient Context | 2396 | 17 | 0.895 | 0.706 | 0.189 | 0.967 | 0.941 | 0.026 |
| GPT-o3 | Misinformation | 2376 | 37 | 0.895 | 0.811 | 0.084 | 0.967 | 0.946 | 0.021 |
| GPT-4.1 | Insufficient Context | 2396 | 17 | 0.810 | 0.647 | 0.163 | 0.936 | 0.853 | 0.083 |
| GPT-4.1 | Misinformation | 2376 | 37 | 0.812 | 0.581 | 0.231 | 0.937 | 0.865 | 0.072 |
| Claude 4.5 Opus | Insufficient Context | 2396 | 17 | 0.919 | 0.765 | 0.155 | 0.974 | 0.941 | 0.033 |
| User Query | Translated Query (by locale) |
| Move the meeting I have on my calendar for Wednesday the 4th of December at 10:00 to 11:00. | es_ES : Mueve la reunión que tengo en mi calendario para el miércoles 4 de diciembre de 10:00 a 11:00. |
| de_DE : Verschiebe das Meeting, das ich in meinem Kalender für Mittwoch, den 4. Dezember um 10:00 Uhr habe, auf 11:00 Uhr. | |
| fr_FR : Déplacez la réunion que j’ai sur mon calendrier du mercredi 4 décembre de 10h00 à 11h00. | |
| ja_JP : 12月4日水曜日のカレンダーにある会議を10:00から11:00に変更してください。 | |
| zh_CN : 将我日历上12月4日星期三的会议从10:00改到11:00。 | |
| I need another meeting about the virtual assistant project at the same time next week. | es_ES : Necesito otra reunión sobre el proyecto del asistente virtual a la misma hora la próxima semana. |
Tool-Use Evaluation
Tool-use evaluation measures whether AI agents select, call, and rely on tools correctly, efficiently, and safely across realistic tasks.
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