RetryBench: Separating Retry Permission from Recovery Outcomes in GPT Tool Use
You Liu, Yue Liu, Quanchao Lu
LLM agents that call external tools must decide what to do when a tool call times out: retrying risks duplicate side effects, while not retrying can leave the task incomplete. We present RetryBench, an evaluation protocol for retry decisions and failure recovery in tool-using LLM agents. Each decision is scored on retry permission (is the retry justified by an idempotency-key guarantee or proof of non-execution?), settled effects (duplicates and omissions), and completion, by replaying it across all hidden execution worlds consistent with the observation. On four synthetic software-engineering tasks, we run two controlled prompt-sensitivity studies (1,728 decisions). Study 1 (idempotency-key descriptions): with the contract fixed, GPT-5.6 Luna reuses the valid idempotency key in 10/40 decisions when an extra key is described as a "Candidate recovery key" but in 39/40 when it is an "Alternative key string"; across three further phrasings per family the gap is 27/120 versus 113/120. GPT-5.6 Sol and Terra are at ceiling (40/40). Study 2 (action order): under underspecified lookup guarantees, retry rates are 17-27 points lower for GPT-5.6 Terra and GPT-5.4 when retry is listed first (option-order bias), mainly on two tasks; we make no claim about which behavior is better. Findings are limited to researcher-chosen phrasings, four tasks and unpinned model aliases. Code and all model responses are released.
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