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Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

Canonical reference. 87% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

145 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce Toolformer, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. This is done in a self-supervised way, requiring nothing more than a handful of demonstrations for each API. We incorporate a range of tools, including a calculator, a Q\&A system, two different search engines, a translation system, and a calendar. Toolformer achieves substantially improved zero-shot performance across a variety of downstream tasks, often competitive with much larger models, without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.

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  • abstract Language models (LMs) exhibit remarkable abilities to solve new tasks from just a few examples or textual instructions, especially at scale. They also, paradoxically, struggle with basic functionality, such as arithmetic or factual lookup, where much simpler and smaller models excel. In this paper, we show that LMs can teach themselves to use external tools via simple APIs and achieve the best of both worlds. We introduce Toolformer, a model trained to decide which APIs to call, when to call them, what arguments to pass, and how to best incorporate the results into future token prediction. Thi

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RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair

cs.SE · 2024-03-25 · conditional · novelty 8.0

RepairAgent autonomously repairs 164 bugs on Defects4J including 39 not fixed by prior techniques by treating an LLM as an agent that invokes tools via a finite state machine and dynamic prompts.

Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web

cs.CL · 2023-06-09 · accept · novelty 8.0

Mind2Web is the first large-scale dataset of real-world web tasks for developing generalist language-guided agents that complete complex actions on diverse websites.

MemGym: a Long-Horizon Memory Environment for LLM Agents

cs.CL · 2026-05-20 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

MemGym unifies agent gyms into a memory benchmark with isolated scoring across tool-use, research, coding, and computer-use regimes plus a lightweight reward model for tractable coding evaluation.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Markov Chain Reliability for LLM Agents

cs.SE · 2026-04-27 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

TraceToChain models LLM agent traces as absorbing DTMCs using automatic clustering and smoothed MLE, with KS and AIC validation, to reconcile pass@k, pass^k, and RDC as projections of a single first-passage success-time distribution.

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