CoTools (Chain-of-Tools)

What is CoTools (Chain-of-Tools)?

CoTools is an innovative framework that empowers large language models (LLMs) to interact with a vast array of external tools-such as APIs, databases, and calculators-without retraining or compromising their core reasoning abilities. By leveraging hidden states and semantic representations within frozen LLMs, CoTools allows AI agents to determine when, which, and how to use tools in real time. This approach enables scalable, flexible, and model-agnostic tool integration, making it ideal for building advanced, context-aware AI systems for enterprise and research applications.

Key Features

• Dynamic Tool Integration

  Enables LLMs to access and utilize thousands of external tools-including unseen ones-based on natural language descriptions, without the need for model retraining.

• Modular Architecture

  Separates decision-making, tool selection, and tool calling into distinct modules (Tool Judge, Tool Retriever, Tool Calling) to maximize efficiency and maintain LLM performance.

• Model-Agnostic Operation

  Works with any open-weight, frozen LLM such as Llama or Mistral, preserving the model's original reasoning and language generation capabilities.

• Real-Time Data Access

  Allows LLMs to fetch live information, perform precise calculations, and interact with enterprise systems for up-to-date, actionable insights.

• Scalable to Massive Toolsets

  Efficiently manages and selects from thousands of tools, outperforming traditional fine-tuning and in-context learning approaches, especially in dynamic or large-scale environments.

Use Cases

• Automated Enterprise Workflows : Integrate with internal and external APIs to automate complex business processes, data retrieval, and reporting without manual intervention.
• Advanced Question Answering : Enhance LLMs with real-time access to knowledge bases, calculators, and other tools for accurate responses to knowledge-intensive or computational queries.
• Security Orchestration : Power security agents that can automate triage, investigations, and threat research by contextually interacting with security tools and data sources.
• Multimodal Content Creation : Orchestrate text, image, and mapping tools to generate rich, customized content such as itineraries, reports, or visual guides.
• Research and Development : Enable AI researchers and developers to build and test tool-augmented LLM agents for new domains without modifying the base model.

FAQs