SOPBench: Evaluating Language Agents at Following Standard Operating Procedures and Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Zekun, Huang, Shinda, Wang, Jiangtian, Zhang, Nathan, Antoniades, Antonis, Hua, Wenyue, Zhu, Kaijie, Zeng, Sirui, Wang, Chi, Wang, William Yang, Yan, Xifeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Zekun
Huang, Shinda
Wang, Jiangtian
Zhang, Nathan
Antoniades, Antonis
Hua, Wenyue
Zhu, Kaijie
Zeng, Sirui
Wang, Chi
Wang, William Yang
Yan, Xifeng
author_facet Li, Zekun
Huang, Shinda
Wang, Jiangtian
Zhang, Nathan
Antoniades, Antonis
Hua, Wenyue
Zhu, Kaijie
Zeng, Sirui
Wang, Chi
Wang, William Yang
Yan, Xifeng
contents As language agents increasingly automate critical tasks, their ability to follow domain-specific standard operating procedures (SOPs), policies, and constraints when taking actions and making tool calls becomes essential yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we develop an automated evaluation pipeline SOPBench with: (1) executable environments containing 167 tools/functions across seven customer service domains with service-specific SOPs and rule-based verifiers, (2) an automated test generation framework producing over 900 verified test cases, and (3) an automated evaluation framework to rigorously assess agent adherence from multiple dimensions. Our approach transforms each service-specific SOP code program into a directed graph of executable functions and requires agents to call these functions based on natural language SOP descriptions. The original code serves as oracle rule-based verifiers to assess compliance, reducing reliance on manual annotations and LLM-based evaluations. We evaluate 18 leading models, and results show the task is challenging even for top-tier models (like GPT-4o, Claude-3.7-Sonnet), with variances across domains. Reasoning models like o4-mini-high show superiority while other powerful models perform less effectively (pass rates of 30%-50%), and small models (7B, 8B) perform significantly worse. Additionally, language agents can be easily jailbroken to overlook SOPs and constraints. Code, data, and over 24k agent trajectories are released at https://github.com/Leezekun/SOPBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_08669
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SOPBench: Evaluating Language Agents at Following Standard Operating Procedures and Constraints
Li, Zekun
Huang, Shinda
Wang, Jiangtian
Zhang, Nathan
Antoniades, Antonis
Hua, Wenyue
Zhu, Kaijie
Zeng, Sirui
Wang, Chi
Wang, William Yang
Yan, Xifeng
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
As language agents increasingly automate critical tasks, their ability to follow domain-specific standard operating procedures (SOPs), policies, and constraints when taking actions and making tool calls becomes essential yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we develop an automated evaluation pipeline SOPBench with: (1) executable environments containing 167 tools/functions across seven customer service domains with service-specific SOPs and rule-based verifiers, (2) an automated test generation framework producing over 900 verified test cases, and (3) an automated evaluation framework to rigorously assess agent adherence from multiple dimensions. Our approach transforms each service-specific SOP code program into a directed graph of executable functions and requires agents to call these functions based on natural language SOP descriptions. The original code serves as oracle rule-based verifiers to assess compliance, reducing reliance on manual annotations and LLM-based evaluations. We evaluate 18 leading models, and results show the task is challenging even for top-tier models (like GPT-4o, Claude-3.7-Sonnet), with variances across domains. Reasoning models like o4-mini-high show superiority while other powerful models perform less effectively (pass rates of 30%-50%), and small models (7B, 8B) perform significantly worse. Additionally, language agents can be easily jailbroken to overlook SOPs and constraints. Code, data, and over 24k agent trajectories are released at https://github.com/Leezekun/SOPBench.
title SOPBench: Evaluating Language Agents at Following Standard Operating Procedures and Constraints
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08669