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OctoTools: An Agentic Framework with Extensible Tools for Complex Reasoning (2502.11271v1)

Published 16 Feb 2025 in cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV, and cs.MA

Abstract: Solving complex reasoning tasks may involve visual understanding, domain knowledge retrieval, numerical calculation, and multi-step reasoning. Existing methods augment LLMs with external tools but are restricted to specialized domains, limited tool types, or require additional training data. In this paper, we introduce OctoTools, a training-free, user-friendly, and easily extensible open-source agentic framework designed to tackle complex reasoning across diverse domains. OctoTools introduces standardized tool cards to encapsulate tool functionality, a planner for both high-level and low-level planning, and an executor to carry out tool usage. We validate OctoTools' generality across 16 diverse tasks (including MathVista, MMLU-Pro, MedQA, and GAIA-Text), achieving substantial average accuracy gains of 9.3% over GPT-4o. Furthermore, OctoTools outperforms AutoGen, GPT-Functions and LangChain by up to 10.6% when given the same set of tools. Through comprehensive analysis and ablations, OctoTools demonstrates advantages in task planning, effective tool usage, and multi-step problem solving.

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Authors (6)
  1. Pan Lu (42 papers)
  2. Bowen Chen (50 papers)
  3. Sheng Liu (122 papers)
  4. Rahul Thapa (16 papers)
  5. Joseph Boen (5 papers)
  6. James Zou (232 papers)

Summary

Okay, let me start by understanding the user's request. They provided the content of a paper titled "OctoTools: An Agentic Framework with Extensible Tools for Complex Reasoning" and want a detailed summary following specific guidelines. The user is a veteran researcher, so the summary needs to be technical and avoid sensational language. I should focus on the framework's components, methodology, results, and contributions without mentioning the arXiv ID.

First, I'll parse the paper's structure. The abstract mentions that OctoTools is a training-free, extensible framework using tool cards, a planner, and an executor. It outperforms baselines like GPT-4o and other agent frameworks. The introduction highlights the challenges in complex reasoning tasks and existing methods' limitations, positioning OctoTools as a solution with tool cards and a planner-executor paradigm.

Next, the methodology section explains the tool cards, which encapsulate tools with metadata, allowing easy integration. The planner handles high-level and low-level planning, while the executor generates executable commands. The toolset optimization algorithm selects optimal tools for specific tasks based on validation performance.

The experiments cover 16 benchmarks across various domains. Results show an average accuracy gain of 9.3% over GPT-4o and up to 10.6% over other frameworks. Ablation studies examine steps, toolset optimization, and model strength. The analysis breaks down tool usage, steps, and performance gains from decomposition versus tool usage.

I need to structure the summary to highlight these points. Start with an overview of OctoTools, then detail each component (tool cards, planner, executor, toolset optimization). Discuss the experimental setup, results, and key findings from the analysis. Mention the ablation studies on steps and toolset optimization, and the use of weaker models.

Important to note the standardized tool cards enabling modular integration without retraining. The separation of planner and executor reduces errors. The toolset optimization's greedy approach improves performance over using all tools. Results across benchmarks show effectiveness in vision, math, medical, and agentic tasks. The analysis distinguishes tasks benefiting more from decomposition versus tool usage.

Avoid terms like "groundbreaking" and focus on technical terms like LLM, CoT, multi-step reasoning. Include numerical results like accuracy gains. Use lists for readability, and ensure the language is academic. Check for any bold terms or contradictory claims, like the planner-executor separation reducing errors compared to prior methods.

Also, ensure not to mention the arXiv ID and avoid phrases like "our paper." Make sure each section flows logically, starting from problem statement, methodology, experiments, results, and contributions. Highlight the planner's iterative refinement and context verification, the executor's command generation, and the tool cards' role in extensibility.

Double-check that all guidelines are followed: no arXiv ID, technical terms without explanation, professional tone, and emphasis on numerical results. Ensure the summary is comprehensive and addresses each section of the paper as presented.

The paper introduces OctoTools, a training-free agentic framework designed to augment LLMs with external tools for complex reasoning tasks. The framework addresses limitations in existing approaches by providing modular tool integration through standardized tool cards, coupled with a planner-executor architecture for multi-step reasoning. Key components include:

  1. Tool Cards:
    • Standardized wrappers encapsulating tool functionality, input/output specifications, and usage metadata (e.g., limitations, best practices).
    • Enable zero-shot integration of new tools without requiring model fine-tuning or framework modification.
    • Examples include Python_Code_Generator_Tool for numerical calculations and Relevant_Patch_Zoomer_Tool for localized visual analysis.
  2. Planner-Executor Architecture:
    • Planner: Generates high-level task decomposition and dynamically refines low-level actions based on intermediate results. Combines query analysis, sub-goal formulation, and context-aware tool selection.
    • Executor: Translates planner actions into executable commands (e.g., Python scripts) and manages tool execution.
  3. Task-Specific Toolset Optimization:
    • Greedy algorithm that selects optimal tool subsets using validation data. Achieves 58.9% average accuracy across tasks, outperforming full-toolset configurations by 1.5%.

Experimental Results:

  • Evaluated on 16 benchmarks spanning visual, mathematical, medical, and agentic domains (e.g., MathVista, MedQA, GAIA-Text):
    • Average accuracy: 58.5% with optimized toolsets, surpassing GPT-4o (49.2%) by 9.3% and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting (50.8%) by 7.7%.
    • Outperforms AutoGen (47.9%), GPT-Functions (51.0%), and LangChain (51.2%) by margins up to 10.6% under identical tool configurations.
  • Key performance drivers:
    • Tool Usage: External tools account for 67.8% of actions in OctoTools versus ≤23.3% in baseline agents. Specialized tools (e.g., Path_Generalist_Classifier_Tool) improve medical task accuracy by up to 22.2%.
    • Multi-Step Reasoning: Benchmarks requiring ≥5 steps (e.g., Game of 24, GAIA-Text) show 11.4–22.5% gains over zero-shot baselines.

Ablations and Analysis:

  • Step Count: Accuracy improves monotonically with maximum allowed steps, plateauing at ~10 steps for most tasks.
  • Toolset Configuration: Full-toolset performance (57.4%) still exceeds base-tool-only (53.9%), demonstrating framework robustness to tool expansion.
  • Model Agnosticism: Maintains 7.1% average gain over GPT-4o-mini baselines despite weaker base LLM performance.

Contributions:

  • Modular framework for integrating heterogeneous tools via standardized interfaces.
  • Systematic evaluation quantifying benefits of tool-augmented reasoning across diverse domains.
  • Open-source implementation with pre-configured tool cards for reproducibility.

The separation of planning and execution reduces error propagation compared to end-to-end tool-calling approaches, while tool cards enable domain adaptation without architectural changes. Limitations include reliance on validation data for toolset optimization and computational overhead from iterative planning.