Enhancing Tool Retrieval with Iterative Feedback from Large Language Models

Qiancheng Xu, Yongqi Li, Heming Xia, Wenjie Li


Abstract
Tool learning aims to enhance and expand large language models’ (LLMs) capabilities with external tools, which has gained significant attention recently. Current methods have shown that LLMs can effectively handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of tools is typically extensive and irregularly updated, emphasizing the necessity for a dedicated tool retrieval component. Tool retrieval is nontrivial due to the following challenges: 1) complex user instructions and tool descriptions; 2) misalignment between tool retrieval and tool usage models. To address the above issues, we propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model. Specifically, we prompt the tool usage model, i.e., the LLM, to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round, which could progressively improve the tool retriever’s understanding of instructions and tools and reduce the gap between the two standalone components. We build a unified and comprehensive benchmark to evaluate tool retrieval models. The extensive experiments indicate that our proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.561
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9609–9619
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.561/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.561
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiancheng Xu, Yongqi Li, Heming Xia, and Wenjie Li. 2024. Enhancing Tool Retrieval with Iterative Feedback from Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9609–9619, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Tool Retrieval with Iterative Feedback from Large Language Models (Xu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.561.pdf