Organizations: School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne · School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, The University of Western Australia
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to complex, multi-step tasks that require interaction with diverse external tools across various domains. However, current LLM agent tool planning methods typically rely on greedy, reactive tool selection strategies that lack foresight and fail to account for inter-tool dependencies. In this paper, we present ToolTree, a novel Monte Carlo tree search-inspired planning paradigm for tool planning. ToolTree explores possible tool usage trajectories using a dual-stage LLM evaluation and bidirectional pruning mechanism that enables the agent to make informed, adaptive decisions over extended tool-use sequences while pruning less promising branches before and after the tool execution. Empirical evaluations across both open-set and closed-set tool planning tasks on 4 benchmarks demonstrate that ToolTree consistently improves performance while keeping the highest efficiency, achieving an average gain of around 10% compared to the state-of-the-art planning paradigm.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison of ToolTree with greedy search and search-based tool planning. Our ToolTree chooses the optimal tool trajectory and answers correctly with 20.
Figure 2: Architecture overview of ToolTree . An input query is processed sequentially via iterative dual evaluation-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search , including selection, pre-evaluation, expansion, execution, post-evaluation and backward-propagation. The Answer Predictor then incorporates the tool trajectories with the highest reward found by the MCTS to produce the final prediction.
Model
Planner
GTA
m&m
Step-by-step
End-to-End
AVG
Step-by-step
Multi-step
AVG
Tool
Arg
Plan
Exec
Tool
Arg
Plan
Exec
GPT-4o-mini
Zero-Shot
58.73
28.44
60.18
33.85
45.30
72.48
67.44
77.48
67.59
71.25
ReAct
60.13
29.43
68.26
34.80
48.16
73.55
65.10
82.16
69.42
72.56
CoT
56.10
25.58
66.47
35.63
45.95
70.13
65.27
76.12
66.96
69.62
Best–First
58.42
30.13
69.96
34.46
47.99
74.42
66.83
83.58
68.37
73.80
Table 1: Comparison of ToolTree with other baselines across GTA and m&m. The experiment is carried out under both step-by-step and end-to-end mode. ”Tool” stands for tool selection F1 score; ”Arg” stands for argument prediction F1 score; ”Plan” and ”Exec” stand for planning and execution F1 score. Ours achieves the best performance overall.
Figure 3: Progressive efficiency analysis across step limits. (a) Performance vs. step limit ; (b) Runtime vs. step limit ; (c) Efficiency vs. step limit . ToolTree achieves the highest efficiency compared with baselines. mprovements are largest for step limits between 12 and 64.
Model
Method
RestBench–TMDB
RestBench–Spotify
ToolBench
Pass
Win
AVG
Pass
Win
AVG
Pass
Win
AVG
GPT-4o-mini
Zero-shot
33.28
50.00
41.64
26.44
50.00
38.22
28.85
50.00
39.42
CoT
34.42
54.70
44.56
29.82
53.10
41.46
26.29
55.47
40.88
ReAct
38.82
61.06
49.94
32.64
59.95
46.30
34.30
58.94
46.62
DFSDT
46.20
64.26
55.23
35.10
65.47
50.28
38.84
68.29
53.57
LATS
51.33
66.67
59.00
39.81
72.85
56.33
40.08
65.77
52.92
Table 2: Open-set tool-planning results on RestBench and ToolBench using GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o as back-end LLMs. Higher values indicate better performance; the best score for each dataset-model pair is highlighted in bold. ”Pass” and ”Win” refer to pass rate and win rate.
Figure 6
Retriever
Method
G1
G2
G3
Contriever
ReAct
61.0
78.0
72.5
ToT
62.8
79.6
75.2
Ours
64.5
81.8
78.3
RoBERTa
ReAct
60.5
76.5
73.0
ToT
63.0
80.0
76.2
Ours
66.0
83.0
82.8
Table 4: Retriever ablation on ToolBench.
Figure 5: Analysis of Performance with respect to model size on Qwen and LLaMA family.
Figure 6: A Sample Case of ToolTree on GTA.
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Domain
Dataset
GPT-4o-mini
GPT-4o
Few-Shot
HuggingGPT
OctoTools
ToolTree (Ours)
Few-Shot
HuggingGPT
OctoTools
ToolTree (Ours)
General Visual
VQAv2
68.82
60.17
69.28
74.47
73.22
67.77
74.18
76.43
GQA
63.80
65.13
66.14
71.54
66.84
60.33
68.58
74.44
SQA
76.50
70.82
78.29
84.28
82.15
78.45
84.13
87.33
Medical
MedQA
79.14
84.33
86.18
91.13
83.20
86.73
92.17
93.88
VQA-Rad
48.10
55.14
60.10
63.27
54.47
58.88
66.42
74.12
Appendix
Table 6: Comparison across 15 datasets in five domains. ToolTree consistently outperforms standard few-shot prompting, HuggingGPT, and OctoTools on both GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o, achieving highest overall score.
Configuration
VQA-Rad
OK-VQA
MathVista
SQA
HotpotQA
AVG
LangChain
62.18
49.18
54.24
76.59
39.82
56.40
w/o COT-SC
65.14
54.37
56.88
82.17
44.90
60.69
w/o ReAct
66.28
52.33
59.25
80.95
45.18
60.80
w/o ToT
63.04
48.12
65.33
78.33
52.28
61.42
w/o ToolTree
67.72
54.27
65.74
81.33
51.94
64.20
MetaGPT
64.13
53.84
54.88
78.16
37.72
57.75
Appendix
Table 7: Comparison of ToolTree as a plug-and-play module with ReAct, COT-SC and ToT modules. ToolTree achieves highest score on average.
Figure 7: Breakdown comparison for each of the domains.
Figure 8: Breakdown comparison with the few-shot baseline setup under GPT-4o-mini.
Backbone
Method
HuggingFace
TensorHub
TorchHub
Avg. Acc. (%)
Avg. Hallu. (%)
GPT-4o-mini
Zero-shot
68.4
59.2
44.5
57.4
22.1
ReAct
69.8
61.5
47.2
59.5
18.5
Tree-of-Thought
71.2
62.8
49.6
61.2
9.3
ToolTree (Ours)
73.5
65.4
53.1
64.0
7.4
GPT-4o
Zero-shot
76.5
69.8
62.3
69.5
7.8
ReAct
77.2
71.0
63.5
70.6
5.1
Appendix
Table 8: APIBench results (BM25 retriever) for GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini with different planning strategies. We report AST-based overall accuracy (%) on HuggingFace, TensorHub, and TorchHub, as well as the macro-average accuracy and hallucination rate across the three subsets.
Backbone
Configuration
Judge error rate
Task success (%, Δ )
GPT-4o
ToolTree (baseline)
25.8%
51.9% (—)
+ Fix false positives
7.4%
52.5% (+0.6)
+ Fix false negatives
18.4%
54.1% (+2.2)
Oracle (perfect judge)
0.0%
54.7% (+2.8)
GPT-4o-mini
ToolTree (baseline)
39.4%
49.5% (—)
+ Fix false positives
16.3%
50.8% (+1.3)
Appendix
Table 9: Restoration analysis of LLM-judge errors on ToolBench. “Judge error rate” is the fraction of incorrect pre-/post-evaluation decisions. “Task success” is the overall pass rate; Δ denotes the absolute difference (in percentage points) relative to the actual ToolTree baseline for each backbone.
Figure 9: Effect of different LLM for post evaluation.
Internal judge
Benchmark evaluator
ToolBench
RestBench
GPT-4o
GPT-4o
69.04
72.48
Gemini-2.5-Flash
GPT-4o
72.71
73.12
LLaMA-3.3-70B
GPT-4o
46.48
50.17
LLaMA-3.3-70B
LLaMA-3.3-70B
38.11
41.64
Appendix
Table 10: Cross-vendor / cross-judge robustness of ToolTree on ToolBench and RestBench (pass rate %). We vary the internal judge used during planning and the external benchmark evaluator.
Figure 10: Two qualitative case studies showcasing ToolTree’s iterative tool orchestration on (a) a radiology image question and (b) a multi-hop knowledge reasoning task.
Added distractors
Total tools
Selection strategy
Avg. F1 (%)
Rel. drop
0 (baseline)
14
Direct context
55.89
/
+10
24
Direct context
55.74
−0.15%
+100
114
Retrieval (Top-20)
55.15
−0.74%
+1,000
1,014
Retrieval (Top-20)
54.82
−1.07%
+10,000
10,014
Retrieval (Top-20)
54.27
−1.62%
Appendix
Table 11: Stress test on tool library size. We start from a 14-tool baseline and progressively add distractor tools. “Avg. F1” denotes average task performance, and “Rel. drop” is the relative performance decrease compared to the 14-tool baseline.
Field
Type
Description / Example
tool_name
string
"Medical_Object_Detection"
description
string
A tool that detects the organs within a given medical image, such as CT, MRI, X-Ray and pathology images.
input
image: str
Path to the image file (e.g. "lung_cancer_Image.png" )
prompt: str
Prompt to guide detection (default: “Detect the organs in the given image.”)
output
dict
Detected organs with their bounding box, organ name, and confidence score.
example
input
{ "lung_cancer_Image.png" }
Appendix
Table 12: Metadata schema for the Medical_Object_Detection tool.
LLM agents increasingly operate in large tool ecosystems, where real-world tasks require discovering relevant tools, inferring implicit sub-goals, and adapting to dynamic environments over long horizons. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks over 1,665 tools that tests whether agents can iteratively retrieve usable tools, invoke them to uncover intermediate evidence for subsequent calls toward the final goal. PlanBench-XL further features an optional blocking mechanism that simulates real-world unpredictability through missing, failing, or distracting tool functions, forcing agents to detect disrupted paths and adapt at runtime. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that massive-tool planning remains challenging: while GPT-5.4 achieves 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings, it collapses to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition. Further analysis shows that agents are especially vulnerable when failures lack explicit error signals or when recovery requires longer alternative tool-use paths. These results establish PlanBench-XL as a testbed for diagnosing agentic planning failures and highlight the need for robust adaptive planning in long-horizon tasks with large, imperfect tool environments.
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools to complete complex real-world tasks. However, reliable tool-use planning remains challenging due to the limitations of implicit reasoning and the evolving nature of real-world execution environments. Existing tool-use agents typically rely on LLMs to infer tool compositions from textual descriptions, which can lead to inefficient exploration and unreliable execution in complex tasks. To address these challenges, we model tool relations at the schema level and construct a directed Tool--Schema Hypergraph, in which tools are represented as hyperedges from their required input-schema nodes to their output-schema nodes. Furthermore, we propose HyperAgent, a Tool--Schema Hypergraph-guided framework for dynamic planning and execution. Given a task, HyperAgent first extracts a task-relevant tool context graph and uses it to guide the construction of a schema-aware Task DAG. During execution, HyperAgent dynamically realizes each subtask by constructing a state-conditioned tool support graph through deficit-oriented expansion, which identifies unresolved requirements and retrieves supporting producer tools according to the current agent state. Experiments on AppWorld demonstrate that HyperAgent improves task completion performance while reducing redundant API calls, LLM interactions, and token consumption compared with existing agent baselines.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced tool-augmented agents, enabling autonomous reasoning via API interactions. However, executing multi-step tasks within massive tool libraries remains challenging due to two critical bottlenecks: (1) the absence of rigorous, plan-level evaluation frameworks and (2) the computational demand of exploring vast decision spaces stemming from large toolsets and long-horizon planning. To bridge these gaps, we first introduce SLATE (Synthetic Large-scale API Toolkit for E-commerce), a large-scale context-aware benchmark designed for the automated assessment of tool-integrated agents. Unlike static metrics, SLATE accommodates diverse yet functionally valid execution trajectories, revealing that current agents struggle with self-correction and search efficiency. Motivated by these findings, we next propose Entropy-Guided Branching (EGB), an uncertainty-aware search algorithm that dynamically expands decision branches where predictive entropy is high. EGB optimizes the exploration-exploitation trade-off, significantly enhancing both task success rates and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on SLATE demonstrate that our dual contribution provides a robust foundation for developing reliable and scalable LLM agents in tool-rich environments.