tool calling
Efficient Tool-Calling Multi-Expert NPC Agent for Commonsense Persona-Grounded Dialogue
We present a multi-expert system for creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs) capable of both natural dialogue and contextual action execution in interactive environments. Our approach leverages Qwen3 as the base model with specialized Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to create three distinct expert modules: tool calling, tool response interpretation, and direct dialogue. The system not only meets but exceeds the computational constraints, delivering responses in an average of 3 seconds (well under the 7-second limit) on L40S GPUs while utilizing less than 30GB of the available 48GB VRAM, demonstrating efficiency alongside performance. This computational efficiency also contributes to reduced energy consumption and lower carbon footprint compared to less optimized approaches. The proposed solution achieved top performance in the Commonsense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge 2025, securing the second position in the competition.
Natural Language Tools: A Natural Language Approach to Tool Calling In Large Language Agents
Johnson, Reid T., Pain, Michelle D., West, Jordan D.
We present Natural Language Tools (NLT), a framework that replaces programmatic JSON tool calling in large language models (LLMs) with natural language outputs. By decoupling tool selection from response generation, NLT eliminates task interference and format constraints that degrade tool call performance. When evaluated across 10 models and 6,400 trials spanning customer service and mental health domains, NLT improves tool calling accuracy by 18.4 percentage points while reducing output variance by 70%. Open-weight models see the largest gains, surpassing flagship closed-weight alternatives, with implications for model training in both reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning stages. These improvements persist under prompt perturbations and extend tool-calling capabilities to models lacking native support.
DrugPilot: LLM-based Parameterized Reasoning Agent for Drug Discovery
Li, Kun, Wu, Zhennan, Wang, Shoupeng, Wu, Jia, Pan, Shirui, Hu, Wenbin
Large language models (LLMs) integrated with autonomous agents hold significant potential for advancing scientific discovery through automated reasoning and task execution. However, applying LLM agents to drug discovery is still constrained by challenges such as large-scale multimodal data processing, limited task automation, and poor support for domain-specific tools. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DrugPilot, a LLM-based agent system with a parameterized reasoning architecture designed for end-to-end scientific workflows in drug discovery. DrugPilot enables multi-stage research processes by integrating structured tool use with a novel parameterized memory pool. The memory pool converts heterogeneous data from both public sources and user-defined inputs into standardized representations. This design supports efficient multi-turn dialogue, reduces information loss during data exchange, and enhances complex scientific decision-making. To support training and benchmarking, we construct a drug instruction dataset covering eight core drug discovery tasks. Under the Berkeley function-calling benchmark, DrugPilot significantly outperforms state-of-the-art agents such as ReAct and LoT, achieving task completion rates of 98.0%, 93.5%, and 64.0% for simple, multi-tool, and multi-turn scenarios, respectively. These results highlight DrugPilot's potential as a versatile agent framework for computational science domains requiring automated, interactive, and data-integrated reasoning.
NesTools: A Dataset for Evaluating Nested Tool Learning Abilities of Large Language Models
Han, Han, Zhu, Tong, Zhang, Xiang, Wu, Mengsong, Xiong, Hao, Chen, Wenliang
Large language models (LLMs) combined with tool learning have gained impressive results in real-world applications. During tool learning, LLMs may call multiple tools in nested orders, where the latter tool call may take the former response as its input parameters. However, current research on the nested tool learning capabilities is still under-explored, since the existing benchmarks lack relevant data instances. To address this problem, we introduce NesTools to bridge the current gap in comprehensive nested tool learning evaluations. NesTools comprises a novel automatic data generation method to construct large-scale nested tool calls with different nesting structures. With manual review and refinement, the dataset is in high quality and closely aligned with real-world scenarios. Therefore, NesTools can serve as a new benchmark to evaluate the nested tool learning abilities of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on 22 LLMs, and provide in-depth analyses with NesTools, which shows that current LLMs still suffer from the complex nested tool learning task.
Reducing Tool Hallucination via Reliability Alignment
Xu, Hongshen, Zhu, Su, Wang, Zihan, Zheng, Hang, Ma, Da, Cao, Ruisheng, Fan, Shuai, Chen, Lu, Yu, Kai
Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their capabilities beyond language generation to interact with external systems through tool calling, offering powerful potential for real-world applications. However, the phenomenon of tool hallucinations, which occur when models improperly select or misuse tools, presents critical challenges that can lead to flawed task execution and increased operational costs. This paper investigates the concept of reliable tool calling and highlights the necessity of addressing tool hallucinations. We systematically categorize tool hallucinations into two main types: tool selection hallucination and tool usage hallucination. To mitigate these issues, we propose a reliability-focused alignment framework that enhances the model's ability to accurately assess tool relevance and usage. By proposing a suite of evaluation metrics and evaluating on StableToolBench, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating tool hallucination and improving the overall system reliability of LLM tool calling.