Scores Are Not Decisions: Cost-Aware Stopping for Tool Acquisition in LLM Agents
As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure. Routers and retrievers can rank candidate tools by relevance, but a ranking alone does not determine how many are worth selecting. Existing approaches leave acquisition under heterogeneous costs unaddressed. We formulate this decision as cost-aware marginal decision-focused stopping (CAM-DF) over ranked tool prefixes, with CAM-DF-lite as a compact interpretable variant. We train directly on the offlin...
| Authors | Yicheng Feng, Yan Zhang, Yan Cheng et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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