Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Efficient Tool Use with Chain-of-Abstraction Reasoning

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2401.17464 v3 pith:EGUB45S6 submitted 2024-01-30 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords reasoningllmstooltoolsknowledgemethodefficientabstract
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

To achieve faithful reasoning that aligns with human expectations, large language models (LLMs) need to ground their reasoning to real-world knowledge (e.g., web facts, math and physical rules). Tools help LLMs access this external knowledge, but there remains challenges for fine-tuning LLM agents (e.g., Toolformer) to invoke tools in multi-step reasoning problems, where inter-connected tool calls require holistic and efficient tool usage planning. In this work, we propose a new method for LLMs to better leverage tools in multi-step reasoning. Our method, Chain-of-Abstraction (CoA), trains LLMs to first decode reasoning chains with abstract placeholders, and then call domain tools to reify each reasoning chain by filling in specific knowledge. This planning with abstract chains enables LLMs to learn more general reasoning strategies, which are robust to shifts of domain knowledge (e.g., math results) relevant to different reasoning questions. It also allows LLMs to perform decoding and calling of external tools in parallel, which avoids the inference delay caused by waiting for tool responses. In mathematical reasoning and Wiki QA domains, we show that our method consistently outperforms previous chain-of-thought and tool-augmented baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets, with an average ~6% absolute QA accuracy improvement. LLM agents trained with our method also show more efficient tool use, with inference speed being on average ~1.4x faster than baseline tool-augmented LLMs.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. AXE: Grey-Box Exploitability Confirmation for Localized Vulnerability Reports

    cs.CR 2026-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Grey-box metadata (CWE + code location) plus a multi-agent LLM workflow raises automated web-exploit confirmation from ~10% to 30% on CVE-Bench, with actionable PoC output.

  2. Continuum: Efficient and Robust Multi-Turn LLM Agent Scheduling with KV Cache Time-to-Live

    cs.OS 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    TTL-based KV-cache pinning that uses predicted tool-call durations and queueing-delay costs cuts agent job completion time by up to 8x.

  3. SimStep: Chain-of-Abstractions for Incremental Specification and Debugging of AI-Generated Interactive Simulations

    cs.HC 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SimStep guides teachers through four editable graph abstractions (concepts, scenario, learning goals, UI interactions) to generate and debug AI-built simulations without writing code.

  4. Mitigating Spurious Correlations in LLMs via Causality-Aware Post-Training

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Fine-tuning a 3B LLM on randomly symbolized reasoning questions reduces spurious-correlation failures and improves OOD accuracy on CLadder and PrOntoQA.

  5. Knowledge Augmented Finetuning Matters in both RAG and Agent Based Dialog Systems

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    On MobileCS2, a GPT-2 finetuned with retrieved knowledge outperforms a prompted GPT-3.5 in both RAG and agent dialog systems, though the comparison is confounded.

  6. Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

    cs.AI 2026-01 conditional novelty 3.0 of 10

    A survey that organizes efficiency techniques for LLM agents into memory, tool learning, and planning, and consolidates benchmarks and metrics for measuring cost-performance trade-offs.

Pith tools