Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution results into the next action prediction. Despite their progress, these methods suffer from performance degradation when addressing practical tasks due to: (1) the pre-defined pipeline with restricted flexibility to calibrate incorrect actions, and (2) the struggle to adapt a general LLM-based agent to perform a variety of specialized actions. To mitigate these problems, we propose ConAgents, a Cooperative and interactive Agents framework, which coordinates three specialized agents for tool selection, tool execution, and action calibration separately. ConAgents introduces two communication protocols to enable the flexible cooperation of agents. To effectively generalize the ConAgents into open-source models, we also propose specialized action distillation, enhancing their ability to perform specialized actions in our framework. Our extensive experiments on three datasets show that the LLMs, when equipped with the ConAgents, outperform baselines with substantial improvement (i.e., up to 14% higher success rate).

Authors 9

1. Zhengliang Shi

   Shandong University

   Affiliation as printed

   Shandong University

2. Shen Gao

   University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

3. Xiuyi Chen

   Baidu (China)

   Affiliation as printed

   Baidu Inc. , Beijing , China

4. Lingyong Yan

   Baidu (China)

   Affiliation as printed

   Baidu Inc. , Beijing , China

5. Haibo Shi

   Baidu (China)

   Affiliation as printed

   Baidu Inc. , Beijing , China

6. Dawei Yin

   Baidu (China)

   Affiliation as printed

   Baidu Inc. , Beijing , China

7. Pengjie Ren

   Shandong University

   Affiliation as printed

   Shandong University

8. Suzan Verberne Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands

9. Zhaochun Ren Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands