ASA: Backbone-Training-Free Representation Engineering for Tool-Calling Agents

Abstract:Adapting LLM agents to domain-specific tool calling remains notably brittle under evolving interfaces. Prompt and schema engineering is easy to deploy but often fragile under distribution shift and strict parsers, while continual parameter-efficient fine-tuning improves reliability at the cost of training, maintenance, and potential forgetting. We identify a critical Lazy Agent failure mode where tool necessity is nearly perfectly decodable from mid-layer activations, yet the model remains conservative in entering tool mode, revealing a representation-behavior gap. We propose Activation Steering Adapter (ASA), a training-free, inference-time controller that performs a single-shot mid-layer intervention and targets tool domains via a router-conditioned mixture of steering vectors with a probe-guided signed gate to amplify true intent while suppressing spurious triggers. On MTU-Bench with Qwen2.5-1.5B, ASA improves strict tool-use F1 from 0.18 to 0.50 while reducing the false positive rate from 0.15 to 0.05, using only about 20KB of portable assets and no weight updates.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2602.04935 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2602.04935v4 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.04935 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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