让大模型智能决定用多少外部工具,省钱又不丢效果。
Scores Are Not Decisions: Cost-Aware Stopping for Tool Acquisition in LLM Agents

- 基于工具排名设计成本感知的停止策略,动态决定何时停用工具。
- 在五类任务中比现有方法多赚收益,强于纯排序或固定阈值方案。
- 适合高成本场景,能减少37%工具调用,无需微调大模型。
随着大模型代理越来越多依赖搜索、数据库等外部服务,如何选择合适的工具成为关键挑战:工具太少信息不足,太多则增加成本、上下文负担和隐私风险。现有路由与检索系统虽可对候选工具排序,但无法确定应选多少个。本文提出成本感知的边际决策导向停止(CAM-DF),以排序前缀为基础,通过训练直接学习当前停止与最佳后续继续之间的差距——其符号决定是否停止,幅度按潜在收益加权误差。理论证明该目标与最优停止一致,且仅靠分数的规则在异构成本下表现不佳。在1,343个任务、五个工具使用领域上评估显示,CAM-DF在$τ$-bench Retail上实现最高收益,优于预测后阈值基线,在所有五种排名来源和两种成本模式下均有提升。该方法在高成本压力下表现卓越,尤其在弱排序时增益更大。实际运行中,相比全量访问,工具暴露减少37%且任务成功率相当。该系列方法为轻量级预执行插件,可将已有工具排序转化为低成本决策,无需微调底层大模型。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure. Routers and retrievers can rank candidate tools by relevance, but a ranking alone does not determine how many are worth selecting. Existing approaches leave acquisition under heterogeneous costs unaddressed. We formulate this decision as cost-aware marginal decision-focused stopping (CAM-DF) over ranked tool prefixes, with CAM-DF-lite as a compact interpretable variant. We train directly on the offline gap between stopping now and the best continuation: its sign labels the decision, its magnitude weights each error by the payoff at stake. We prove this objective is Bayes-aligned with the stopping target and that score-only rules are suboptimal under heterogeneous costs. We evaluate on 1,343 tasks across five tool-use domains. On $τ$-bench Retail, CAM-DF attains the highest payoff among deployable methods, with gains over a predict-then-threshold baseline across all five ranking sources and two cost regimes. Our approach is state-of-the-art under heterogeneous costs and high cost pressure, with larger gains under weaker rankings. In live execution, CAM-DF exposes the agent to 37\% fewer tools than full access while maintaining comparable task success. The CAM-DF family is a lightweight pre-execution plugin that turns existing tool rankings into lower-cost acquisition decisions without fine-tuning the underlying LLM.
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