Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lu, Xuan, Huang, Haohang, Meng, Rui, Jin, Yaohui, Zeng, Wenjun, Shen, Xiaoyu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Lu, Xuan
Huang, Haohang
Meng, Rui
Jin, Yaohui
Zeng, Wenjun
Shen, Xiaoyu
author_facet Lu, Xuan
Huang, Haohang
Meng, Rui
Jin, Yaohui
Zeng, Wenjun
Shen, Xiaoyu
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in tool use, yet progress in tool retrieval remains hindered by incomplete and heterogeneous tool documentation. To address this challenge, we introduce Tool-DE, a new benchmark and framework that systematically enriches tool documentation with structured fields to enable more effective tool retrieval, together with two dedicated models, Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank. We design a scalable document expansion pipeline that leverages both open- and closed-source LLMs to generate, validate, and refine enriched tool profiles at low cost, producing large-scale corpora with 50k instances for embedding-based retrievers and 200k for rerankers. On top of this data, we develop two models specifically tailored for tool retrieval: Tool-Embed, a dense retriever, and Tool-Rank, an LLM-based reranker. Extensive experiments on ToolRet and Tool-DE demonstrate that document expansion substantially improves retrieval performance, with Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank achieving new state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks. We further analyze the contribution of individual fields to retrieval effectiveness, as well as the broader impact of document expansion on both training and evaluation. Overall, our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of LLM-driven document expansion, positioning Tool-DE, along with the proposed Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank, as a foundation for future research in tool retrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22670
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrieval
Lu, Xuan
Huang, Haohang
Meng, Rui
Jin, Yaohui
Zeng, Wenjun
Shen, Xiaoyu
Information Retrieval
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in tool use, yet progress in tool retrieval remains hindered by incomplete and heterogeneous tool documentation. To address this challenge, we introduce Tool-DE, a new benchmark and framework that systematically enriches tool documentation with structured fields to enable more effective tool retrieval, together with two dedicated models, Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank. We design a scalable document expansion pipeline that leverages both open- and closed-source LLMs to generate, validate, and refine enriched tool profiles at low cost, producing large-scale corpora with 50k instances for embedding-based retrievers and 200k for rerankers. On top of this data, we develop two models specifically tailored for tool retrieval: Tool-Embed, a dense retriever, and Tool-Rank, an LLM-based reranker. Extensive experiments on ToolRet and Tool-DE demonstrate that document expansion substantially improves retrieval performance, with Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank achieving new state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks. We further analyze the contribution of individual fields to retrieval effectiveness, as well as the broader impact of document expansion on both training and evaluation. Overall, our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of LLM-driven document expansion, positioning Tool-DE, along with the proposed Tool-Embed and Tool-Rank, as a foundation for future research in tool retrieval.
title Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrieval
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22670