ToolDreamer: Instilling LLM Reasoning Into Tool Retrievers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sengupta, Saptarshi, Zhou, Zhengyu, Araki, Jun, Wang, Xingbo, Wang, Bingqing, Wang, Suhang, Feng, Zhe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sengupta, Saptarshi
Zhou, Zhengyu
Araki, Jun
Wang, Xingbo
Wang, Bingqing
Wang, Suhang
Feng, Zhe
author_facet Sengupta, Saptarshi
Zhou, Zhengyu
Araki, Jun
Wang, Xingbo
Wang, Bingqing
Wang, Suhang
Feng, Zhe
contents Tool calling has become increasingly popular for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, for large tool sets, the resulting tokens would exceed the LLM's context window limit, making it impossible to include every tool. Hence, an external retriever is used to provide LLMs with the most relevant tools for a query. Existing retrieval models rank tools based on the similarity between a user query and a tool description (TD). This leads to suboptimal retrieval as user requests are often poorly aligned with the language of TD. To remedy the issue, we propose ToolDreamer, a framework to condition retriever models to fetch tools based on hypothetical (synthetic) TD generated using an LLM, i.e., description of tools that the LLM feels will be potentially useful for the query. The framework enables a more natural alignment between queries and tools within the language space of TD's. We apply ToolDreamer on the ToolRet dataset and show that our method improves the performance of sparse and dense retrievers with and without training, thus showcasing its flexibility. Through our proposed framework, our aim is to offload a portion of the reasoning burden to the retriever so that the LLM may effectively handle a large collection of tools without inundating its context window.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19791
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ToolDreamer: Instilling LLM Reasoning Into Tool Retrievers
Sengupta, Saptarshi
Zhou, Zhengyu
Araki, Jun
Wang, Xingbo
Wang, Bingqing
Wang, Suhang
Feng, Zhe
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Tool calling has become increasingly popular for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, for large tool sets, the resulting tokens would exceed the LLM's context window limit, making it impossible to include every tool. Hence, an external retriever is used to provide LLMs with the most relevant tools for a query. Existing retrieval models rank tools based on the similarity between a user query and a tool description (TD). This leads to suboptimal retrieval as user requests are often poorly aligned with the language of TD. To remedy the issue, we propose ToolDreamer, a framework to condition retriever models to fetch tools based on hypothetical (synthetic) TD generated using an LLM, i.e., description of tools that the LLM feels will be potentially useful for the query. The framework enables a more natural alignment between queries and tools within the language space of TD's. We apply ToolDreamer on the ToolRet dataset and show that our method improves the performance of sparse and dense retrievers with and without training, thus showcasing its flexibility. Through our proposed framework, our aim is to offload a portion of the reasoning burden to the retriever so that the LLM may effectively handle a large collection of tools without inundating its context window.
title ToolDreamer: Instilling LLM Reasoning Into Tool Retrievers
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19791