How Many Tools Should an LLM Agent See? A Chance-Corrected Answer
Before an LLM agent can use a tool, a retrieval system must decide which candidate tools to show to the agent. How long should that shortlist be? Show too many tools and the model struggles to choose. Show too few and the correct tool may not appear. Most systems apply a fixed shortlist size to every query, but no standard metric exists to evaluate whether that size was appropriate. We treat the number of tools shown to an LLM agent as the object of evaluation and we apply Bits-over-Random (BoR), a chance-corrected metric that asks whether success at a given depth is better than what random selection would achieve at that same depth. We evaluate BoR across three tool-selection benchmarks,...
| Authors | Vyzantinos Repantis, Ameya Gawde, Harshvardhan Singh et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 23 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.