Explore Separately, Adopt Selectively: Execution-Guided Tool Use over Large Tool Libraries

Tool retrieval is a critical bottleneck for LLM-based agents operating over large, heterogeneous API ecosystems. Existing approaches face an inherent trade-off: semantic retrievers are fast but suffer from the semantic-functional gap, while execution-based validation improves precision at the cost of prohibitive latency. We propose Lookahead-R, a planning-based framework that reformulates tool retrieval as a resource-constrained sequential decision-making problem. At its core, Lookahead-R introduces a lightweight execution-aware surrogate world model that jointly predicts tool execution success, latency cost, and semantic utility---without invoking real APIs. This world model drives a cost-sensitive, uncertainty-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search that navigates the tool space under strict budget constraints. Evaluated on the large-scale ToolBench benchmark, Lookahead-R achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off across all test scenarios. On the most challenging I3 split, it attains an NDCG@5 of 91.40%, outperforming the state-of-the-art ToolGen (90.16%) by 1.24%. Ablation studies confirm that explicit latency modeling is the key discriminative signal for identifying high-quality tools under resource constraints.

A multi-step agent task fails when a single tool it needs is missing, yet the tools an agent may need are too many to list: the roughly 8,200 tools on the platform we study have definitions that together exceed the context window of any model we evaluate. We present Tool Recommendation, a deployed system that gives an agent all of them, hundreds of times more than a typical MCP server exposes, through a fixed interface of three tools. It runs at the gateway between agent and tools, executing every call under the end user's own credentials and checking it against the user's consent for each service and the tools the agent may use. We evaluate it on both a public retrieval benchmark and billed end-to-end session cost. On ToolRet, Tool Recommendation places every tool a query needs in the top ten 57% more often than BM25, a lexical ranking that commercial tool search offers, and compares favorably with published systems up to nine times its size. In paired multi-step workflows, its first recommendation covered every required tool in 93% of Codex sessions, and against a fixed list of 100 tools it cut input tokens by 17% with Codex and 40% with Claude Code and the total bill in all 14 runs, by up to 40%, with no change in task completion.

Large language model agents that use external tools are often implemented through reactive execution, in which reasoning is repeatedly recomputed after each observation, increasing latency and sensitivity to error propagation. This work introduces Profile--Then--Reason (PTR), a bounded execution framework for structured tool-augmented reasoning, in which a language model first synthesizes an explicit workflow, deterministic or guarded operators execute that workflow, a verifier evaluates the resulting trace, and repair is invoked only when the original workflow is no longer reliable. A mathematical formulation is developed in which the full pipeline is expressed as a composition of profile, routing, execution, verification, repair, and reasoning operators; under bounded repair, the number of language-model calls is restricted to two in the nominal case and three in the worst case. Experiments against a ReAct baseline on six benchmarks and four language models show that PTR achieves the pairwise exact-match advantage in 16 of 24 configurations. The results indicate that PTR is particularly effective on retrieval-centered and decomposition-heavy tasks, whereas reactive execution remains preferable when success depends on substantial online adaptation.