AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · 3h ago6/10
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Are Tools All We Need? Unveiling the Tool-Use Tax in LLM Agents
Researchers demonstrate that tool-augmented reasoning in LLM agents doesn't always outperform chain-of-thought reasoning, especially when semantic noise is present. A proposed "tool-use tax" reveals that protocol overhead and formatting costs often negate performance gains from tool execution, with a lightweight gating solution offering only partial mitigation.