CTBench: Evaluating Troubleshooting Capabilities of AI Agents in Realistic Telecom Network Operations

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.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to network troubleshooting, but root-cause localization on public benchmarks remains well below practical deployment thresholds. We argue this is because existing agents do not encode the disciplined, layer-by-layer methodology that human network engineers use, and instead rely on free-form deliberation that conflates evidence acquisition with hypothesis commitment. We present SADE (Symptom-Aware Diagnostic Escalation), an agent that encodes the classical Cisco troubleshooting methodology as an explicit policy. SADE pairs a phase-gated diagnostic workflow, which separates evidence acquisition from hypothesis commitment, with a routed library of fault-family skills and high-yield diagnostic helpers. On a held-out 523 incident set of the public NIKA benchmark covering eleven unseen scenarios, SADE improves root-cause F1 by 37 percentage points over a ReAct + GPT-5 baseline; a model-controlled comparison against the same Claude Sonnet backend without the SADE policy attributes 22 of those points to the diagnostic policy alone, showing that the gain is not a side-effect of the model upgrade.

Managing modern computing infrastructure has become a steadily harder problem due to the ever-increasing complexity. Recent advances in AI agents create a timely opportunity to automate infrastructure management tasks, but it remains unclear how well such agents can handle real-world infrastructure complexity. We present InfraBench, a benchmark suite for evaluating AI agents on realistic infrastructure tasks across the full system stack and full operational lifecycle with fine-grained risk assessment. Experiments with 15 agent-model configurations show that even the strongest agent cannot secure a full score across all tasks. Mean effective scores range from roughly 40% to 88% (with per-configuration standard errors of 6-12 points), repeating every task three times reveals that top configurations still pass only a fraction of their attempts, and per-check scoring exposes a general failure pattern: agents may routinely satisfy short-term objectives while leaving non-durable changes, broken distributed invariants, unsafe side effects, and uncleaned state behind. INFRABENCH, including its live leaderboard, tasks, and evaluation harness, is publicly available at infraben.ch.