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HFEPX · Eval paper review

RefTool: Reference-Guided Tool Creation for Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning

Xiao Liu, Da Yin, Zirui Wu, Yansong Feng

Published

May 27, 2025

Citations

0

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

25/100 (Low)

Extraction confidence

45% (Low)

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Rater population

Not reported

Signals refreshed

Feb 28, 2026

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Tags

Automatic Metrics Multilingual Tool Use

Should you rely on this paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Main weakness

The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.

Human feedback signal
Not explicit
Not explicit in abstract metadata
Evaluation signal
Detected
Eval setup described
Usefulness for eval research
25/100
Adjacent candidate

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here

Human Eval Papers LLM-as-Judge Papers Pairwise Preference Papers Tool-Use Evaluation Search

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 being cost-efficient and broadly generalizable to non-scientific tasks, e.g., extremely low-resource language translation. Analyses reveal that grounding tool creation in references produces accurate and faithful tools, and that the hierarchical structure facilitates effective tool selection. RefTool enables LLMs to overcome internal knowledge limitations, advancing generalizable reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains.

What we could verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"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 being cost-efficient and broadly generalizable to non-scientific tasks, e.g., extremely low-resource language translation."

Benchmarks and datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported metrics

accuracy
Human feedback details
Uses human feedback
No
Feedback types
None
Rater population
Not reported
Expertise required
Multilingual
Evaluation details
Evaluation modes
Automatic Metrics
Agentic eval
Tool Use
Quality controls
Not reported
Evidence quality
Low
Use this page as
Background context only

Research brief

Metadata summary

Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their reasoning capabilities by using external tools.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key takeaways

  • 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.

Researcher actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended queries

Accuracy

Contribution summary

  • 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.
  • 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 being cost-efficient and broadly generalizable…

Why it matters for eval

  • 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 being cost-efficient and broadly generalizable…

Researcher checklist

  • Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy