What Are Tools Anyway? A Survey from the Language Model Perspective
- Thesis: The paper does a survey regarding tool usage that helps us understand:
- What is the definition of a tool?
- What are the main categories of tools?
- How to use the tools?
- When to use tools?
- When and how to make tools?
- Notes:
- Categories of tools:
- Perception: Collect information about the environment such as getting the current date or checking the weather
- Action: Performs actions in the environment that will change state such as positing content on a website or writing to a table in a database
- Computation: Use programs to perform computation such as mathematical computation
- A tool can belong to multiple categories such as SQL queries that can perform computation, retrieve data, and update/write to tables
- Usage of tooling:
- Inference-time prompting: Incorporate instructions inside the prompt that shows few examples of pairs of queries and tools or use tool documentation
- Learning by training: Fine-tune LM through annotated data that illustrates the tool usage (self-supervised)
- Tool-usage may not be useful in all scenarios such as for summarization or sentiment analysis since the base LM most likely is able to do the job just fine or even outperform specialized smaller models
- Complex tool usage. If we have small fixed tools, we can use them in-context in the prompt; otherwise, we may need to use retrievers to get the top related tools and feed them to the LM
- Categories of tools:
#nlp #llm #agents
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