[2505.21413] RefTool: Reference-Guided Tool Creation for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2505.21413 (cs) [Submitted on 27 May 2025 (v1), last revised 28 Feb 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:RefTool: Reference-Guided Tool Creation for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning Authors:Xiao Liu, Da Yin, Zirui Wu, Yansong Feng View a PDF of the paper titled RefTool: Reference-Guided Tool Creation for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning, by Xiao Liu and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools. However, many tasks lack predefined tools. Prior works have explored instructing LLMs to generate tools on their own, but such approaches depend heavily on internal knowledge and struggle when tasks fall outside the model's knowledge scope. To address this limitation, we propose RefTool, a reference-guided framework for automatic tool creation that leverages external materials, such as textbooks and knowledge snippets. RefTool consists of two modules: (1) tool creation, where LLMs generate executable tools from reference content, validate them using illustrative examples, and organize them hierarchically into a toolbox; and (2) tool utilization, where LLMs navigate the toolbox structure to select and apply the appropriate tools to solve problems. Experiments on causality, physics, and chemistry benchmarks demonstrate that RefTool outperforms existing tool-creation and domain-specific reasoning methods by 12.3% on average accuracy, while bei...