aiqbench analysis
Toollery addresses the scalability bottleneck in LLM agents by introducing a training-free framework that compresses vast tool libraries into compact candidate sets before final selection. This approach significantly reduces prompt token usage and latency while maintaining high recall across benchmarks with tens of thousands of capabilities. The method demonstrates that efficient agent scaling is achievable without retraining models, relying instead on retrieval-based query expansion.
Toollery: Scaling LLM Agents to Thousands of Skills and Tools
arXiv:2609.22218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM agents are exposed to hundreds to tens of thousands of skills, tools, and API functions, full-library prompting becomes costly, slow, and less reliable: each added candidate increases prompt tokens and latency, while longer candidate lists introduce more distractors for LLM selection. We present \textbf{Toollery}, a training-free candidate-compression framework for scalable LLM skill/tool selection. Following established document-side query expansion, Toollery generates user-intent queries from each skill/tool specification and builds a retrieval index that maps real user requests to compact candidate sets before final LLM decision-making. By treating high-level skills and atomic tools as selectable capabilities, Toollery can be applied to both skill libraries and tool registries. We evaluate Toollery on the roughly 79K-capability SkillRouter benchmark, BFCL-V4 with over 440 atomic tools, and 3,396 proprietary smart-cockpit requests over 220 tools. Across these settings, Toollery keeps online selection bounded to a compact top-$k$ candidate set and improves recall over ordinary specification retrieval. At a fixed top-10 budget, Toollery improves end-to-end selection on the cockpit dataset, and maintains comparable AST Accuracy on BFCL-V4. These results support Toollery as a practical candidate-compression framework for large and evolving agent capability libraries, while showing that quality and cost gains depend on workload coverage and provider caching.
Abstract:As LLM agents are exposed to hundreds to tens of thousands of skills, tools, and API functions, full-library prompting becomes costly, slow, and less reliable: each added candidate increases prompt tokens and latency, while longer candidate lists introduce more distractors for LLM selection. We present \textbf{Toollery}, a training-free candidate-compression framework for scalable LLM skill/tool selection. Following established document-side query expansion, Toollery generates user-intent queries from each skill/tool specification and builds a retrieval index that maps real user requests to compact candidate sets before final LLM decision-making. By treating high-level skills and atomic tools as selectable capabilities, Toollery can be applied to both skill libraries and tool registries. We evaluate Toollery on the roughly 79K-capability SkillRouter benchmark, BFCL-V4 with over 440 atomic tools, and 3,396 proprietary smart-cockpit requests over 220 tools. Across these settings, Toollery keeps online selection bounded to a compact top-$k$ candidate set and improves recall over ordinary specification retrieval. At a fixed top-10 budget, Toollery improves end-to-end selection on the cockpit dataset, and maintains comparable AST Accuracy on BFCL-V4. These results support Toollery as a practical candidate-compression framework for large and evolving agent capability libraries, while showing that quality and cost gains depend on workload coverage and provider caching.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2609.22218 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2609.22218v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22218 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 300 words
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