The paper introduces a model‑adaptive definition of tool necessity that accounts for each LLM’s empirical performance, contrasting it with observed tool‑call behavior across four models on arithmetic and factual QA datasets. It finds substantial mismatches—26.5‑54.0% for arithmetic and 30.8‑41.8% for factual QA—between when tools are needed and when they are actually used. By probing hidden states, the authors show that the main source of mismatch lies in the transition from internal cognition (recognizing tool necessity) to action (making a tool call), revealing a knowing‑doing gap in LLM tool use.
By Yize Cheng, Chenrui Fan, Mahdi JafariRaviz, Keivan Rezaei, Soheil Feizi
The paper audits frozen decoder‑only large language models (LLMs) on geometric reasoning tasks using parametric CAD constraints. It probes hidden states for linear decodability, forced‑choice generation, activation‑level influence, and behavioral steerability, finding that pretraining improves decoding of local geometric relations but not sketch‑level DOF status. The study shows that decodable information is not always actionable: generation often fails to express it, and steering interventions do not reliably control outputs, revealing divergences among decodability, generation, activation influence, and steerability.
By Man Liang, Xinzhao Cheng, Faizan Wajid
arXiv:2606.02357v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Tool-augmented multimodal agents show strong benchmark gains, often taken as evidence that agents have learned to use tools. We argue that th...
By Jiawei Guo, Donglei Yu, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Xinpei Zhao, Huaxing Liu, Qinghao Wang, Minpeng Liao
arXiv:2606. 02357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-augmented multimodal agents show strong benchmark gains, often taken as evidence that agents have learned to use tools.
By Garvin Guo, Donglei Yu, Yu Chen, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Xinpei Zhao, Huaxing Liu, Qinghao Wang, Minpeng Liao
arXiv:2610.09624v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Tool calling, invoking external tools on demand, is central to agentic LLMs, yet the mechanism that decides whether a model calls a tool or responds...
By Xijie Gong, Tingxu Han, Jiahao Zhang, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Hanqi Yan, Youcheng Sun, Lijie Hu
arXiv:2603.18614v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) must tightly couple multi-step reasoning with external actions, yet existing benchmarks often confound...
By Wanjia Zhao, Ludwig Schmidt, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Vidhisha Balachandran, Lingjiao Chen
The paper investigates how language models decide between contextual information and their internal memory when the two conflict. By estimating "authority directions" from agreement prompts and swapping these directions between matched prompts, the authors show that such interventions can reproduce 30–68% of the shift in source choice across Qwen, Llama, and OLMo models. Cross‑task experiments reveal that authority directions learned on one task transfer only modestly (≈9%) to another, indicating that authority computations are largely task‑specific.
By Benjamin Shih, John Winnicki, Arianna Cao
arXiv:2606. 06735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear activation steering has gained popularity as a simple and empirically effective way to control language model behavior.
By Georgii Aparin, Tatiana Gaintseva
arXiv:2606. 06284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly rely on external tools, but larger tool menus can reduce reliability and efficiency by increasing wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and token cost.
By Rahul Suresh Babu, Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer
UniToolCall introduces a unified framework for tool-use in large language model agents, standardizing toolset construction, dataset generation, and evaluation. The framework aggregates over 22,000 tools and creates a hybrid training corpus of more than 390,000 instances by combining ten public datasets with synthetically generated, structurally controlled trajectories. It models diverse interaction patterns—single‑hop vs. multi‑hop, single‑turn vs. multi‑turn, serial vs. parallel execution—and adds an Anchor Linkage mechanism to enforce cross‑turn dependencies, while converting seven public benchmarks into a common Query–Action–Observation–Answer format for fine‑grained evaluation.
By Yijuan Liang, Xinghao Chen, Yifan Ge, Ziyi Wu, Hao Wu, Changyu Zeng, Wei Xing, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2606. 16813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented LLM agents rely on runtime filtering to decide which tools should be visible at each step.
By Rahul Suresh Babu, Rohit Shukla
The paper introduces a causal, layerwise audit method called the CoT Mediation Index (CMI) to evaluate whether chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting truly influences a language model’s internal computation. By comparing performance degradation from patching CoT-token hidden states against matched control patches, the authors find that CoT influence is often confined to narrow reasoning windows and can be nearly absent even when the model produces fluent rationales. The study shows that models explicitly tuned for reasoning exhibit stronger mediation, while Mixture-of-Experts models display more distributed mediation, indicating that CoT faithfulness varies across models and tasks.
By Anish Sathyanarayanan, Aditya Nagarsekar, Aarush Rathore