Async-RBench: Benchmarking Asynchronous Task Execution in LLM Agents
TL;DR
The challenges of reliable asynchronous task execution in LLM agents are highlighted and the need to evaluate how agents handle incoming results alongside end-to-end task success is highlighted.
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute tasks asynchronously: a main agent continues working while its subagents run, and the task state may change before their results arrive. The main agent must decide which work to update or preserve and which checks to repeat, while avoiding prohibited changes. Final task success alone does not reveal whether these results were handled correctly, and natural asynchronous arrivals are hard to reproduce. We introduce Async-RBench, a benchmark for asynchronous task execution in LLM agents, with 200 executable tasks covering eight scenarios. A scenario controller regulates result delivery using predefined task-state conditions, while an Event Response Contract (ERC) specifies what each response must change, preserve, avoid, and re-verify. The Dynamic Replanning Score (DRS) weights the response process and outcome equally and is reported separately from task success. We evaluate nine agents and find DRS scores of 19.2 to 45.1, with the lowest scores on duplicate reports and subagent failures. Under our execution protocol, all nine agents obtain lower task success with asynchronous than with batched delivery (26.0% vs. 29.7% on average). For three agents, prompting the main agent to rebuild its plan after every result improves DRS by only 2.6 to 3.5 points. Together, these findings highlight the challenges of reliable asynchronous task execution and the need to evaluate how agents handle incoming results alongside end-to-end task success.
