Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12961v1
• Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2025 15:45:01 GMT
• Title: Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger
• Authors: Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu,
• Abstract summary: We propose MeCo, an adaptive decision-making strategy for external tool use. MeCo captures high-level cognitive signals in the representation space, guiding when to invoke tools. Our experiments show that MeCo accurately detects LLMs' internal cognitive signals and significantly improves tool-use decision-making.
• Score: 49.81945268343162
• License:
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable emergent capabilities, transforming the execution of functional tasks by leveraging external tools for complex problems that require specialized processing or real-time data. While existing research expands LLMs access to diverse tools (e.g., program interpreters, search engines, weather/map apps), the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. This naive approach raises two key issues:(1) increased delays due to unnecessary tool calls, and (2) potential errors resulting from faulty interactions with external tools. In this paper, we introduce meta-cognition as a proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, representing the model's awareness of its own limitations. Based on this, we propose MeCo, an adaptive decision-making strategy for external tool use. MeCo quantifies metacognitive scores by capturing high-level cognitive signals in the representation space, guiding when to invoke tools. Notably, MeCo is fine-tuning-free and incurs minimal cost. Our experiments show that MeCo accurately detects LLMs' internal cognitive signals and significantly improves tool-use decision-making across multiple base models and benchmarks.

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