cs.CLMar 16, 2026

TelcoAgent-Bench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Telecom AI Agents

Authors: Lina Bariah, Brahim Mefgouda, Farbod Tavakkoli, Enrique Molero, Louis Powell, Merouane Debbah

Organizations: Research Institute for Digital Future, Khalifa University · AT&T CDO · GSMA

Abstract

The integration of large language model (LLM) agents into telecom networks introduces new challenges, related to intent recognition, tool execution, and resolution generation, while taking into consideration different operational constraints. In this paper, we introduce TelcoAgent-Bench and TelcoAgent-Metrics, a Telecom-specific benchmarking framework for evaluating multilingual telecom LLM agents. The proposed framework assesses the semantic understanding as well as process-level alignment with structured troubleshooting flows and stability across repeated scenario variations. Our contribution includes a structured suite of metrics that assess intent recognition, ordered tool execution, resolution correctness, and stability across scenario variations, with the aim of quantifying the reliability and operational consistency of LLM agents in telecom environments. The framework is designed to operate in both English and Arabic, to address the need for multilingual agent deployment in operational network environments. Our experimental results show that although recent instruct-tuned models can understand telecom problems in a reasonable way, they usually struggle to consistently follow the required troubleshooting steps and to maintain stable behavior when exposed to different variations of the same scenario. This performance gap becomes more pronounced in unconstrained and bilingual settings.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

May 18, 2026

TeleCom-Bench: How Far Are Large Language Models from Industrial Telecommunication Applications?

While Large Language Models have achieved remarkable integration in various vertical scenarios, their deployment in the telecommunications domain remains exploratory due to the lack of a standardized evaluation framework. Current telecom benchmarks primarily focus on static, foundational knowledge and isolated atomic skills, neglecting the equipment-specific documentation and end-to-end industrial workflows essential for real-world production systems. To bridge this gap, we present TeleCom-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 12 evaluation sets with 22,678 curated samples, which evaluates LLMs across a synergistic hierarchy: (1) Multi-dimensional Knowledge Comprehension, which integrates telecommunication fundamentals, 3GPP protocols, and 5G network architecture with proprietary product knowledge across wired, core, and wireless networks via knowledge graph-driven synthesis; and (2)End-to-End Knowledge Application, which formalizes six core tasks on authentic trajectories from live network agent workflows, including intent recognition, entity extraction, event verification, tool invocation, root cause analysis, and solution generation-across network optimization and fault maintenance scenarios. Evaluations of eight state-of-the-art LLMs reveal a universal Execution Wall: while models achieve 90% accuracy in linguistic interface tasks such as intent recognition and entity extraction, performance collapses to approximately 30% in procedural execution tasks like solution generation. This capability gap demonstrates that current LLMs function competently as diagnosticians but fail as field engineers. TeleCom-Bench provides standardized diagnostics to precisely pinpoint this deficit, offering actionable guidance for domain-specific alignment toward production-ready telecom agents. The dataset and evaluation code have been released at https://github.com/ZTE-AICloud/TeleCom-Bench.
Mar 16, 2026

SKILLS: Structured Knowledge Injection for LLM-Driven Telecommunications Operations

As telecommunications operators accelerate adoption of AI-enabled automation, a practical question remains unresolved: can general-purpose large language model (LLM) agents reliably execute telecom operations workflows through real API interfaces, or do they require structured domain guidance? We introduce SKILLS (Structured Knowledge Injection for LLM-driven Service Lifecycle operations), a benchmark framework comprising 37 telecom operations scenarios spanning 8 TM Forum Open API domains (TMF620, TMF621, TMF622, TMF628, TMF629, TMF637, TMF639, TMF724). Each scenario is grounded in live mock API servers with seeded production-representative data, MCP tool interfaces, and deterministic evaluation rubrics combining response content checks, tool-call verification, and database state assertions. We evaluate open-weight models under two conditions: baseline (generic agent with tool access but no domain guidance) and with-skill (agent augmented with a portable SKILL.md document encoding workflow logic, API patterns, and business rules). Results across 5 open-weight model conditions and 185 scenario-runs show consistent skill lift across all models. MiniMax M2.5 leads (81.1% with-skill, +13.5pp), followed by Nemotron 120B (78.4%, +18.9pp), GLM-5 Turbo (78.4%, +5.4pp), and Seed 2.0 Lite (75.7%, +18.9pp).
May 11, 2026

TeleResilienceBench: Quantifying Resilience for LLM Reasoning in Telecommunications

Deploying large language models in telecommunications requires more than task accuracy. In realistic workflows, a model may inherit partially completed reasoning from a prior step, an upstream agent, or its own earlier generation, and must continue that reasoning even when it is already going wrong. We introduce TeleResilienceBench, a benchmark that quantifies this capability, which we term reasoning resilience, across seven telecom sub-domains drawn from the GSMA Open-Telco LLM suite. Instances are constructed by collecting failures from a weak generator model, truncating the flawed reasoning trace at its midpoint, and asking a target model to continue and correct it. We propose the Correct Flip Rate (CFR) as a direct measure of successful recovery and evaluate eight models spanning the Qwen3.5, Gemma4, and Nemotron-3 families. Our results show that even the strongest model achieves a macro-average CFR of only 29.1%, and scale does not reliably improve resilience within families. Nemotron-3-nano 4b outperforms all Qwen3.5 variants including the 27b model and leads the auxiliary TeleMath numerical evaluation at 23.4% CR%, offering the best resilience-to-cost ratio in the set. A difficulty-stratified analysis further reveals that existing telecom benchmark difficulty labels reflect factual specificity rather than reasoning depth, suggesting that current evaluations measure knowledge coverage more than reasoning ability.