# TOOL-ED: Enhancing Empathetic Response Generation with the Tool Calling Capability of LLM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.03096 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03096/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 36 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [EVA: Exploring the Limits of Masked Visual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07636/) (2022)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [ToolAlpaca: Generalized Tool Learning for Language Models with 3000 Simulated Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05301/) (2023)
- [Tool Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08354/) (2023)
- [ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17452/) (2023)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18752/) (2023)
- [Tool Learning with Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17935/) (2024)
- [On the Robustness of ChatGPT: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12095/) (2023)
- [MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01454/) (2020)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [Confucius: Iterative Tool Learning from Introspection Feedback by Easy-to-Difficult Curriculum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14034/) (2023)
- [Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03031/) (2024)
- [Let Me Do It For You: Towards LLM Empowered Recommendation via Tool Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15114/) (2024)
- [Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05140/) (2023)
- [Dialogue Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Commonsense-aware Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09343/) (2023)
- [STICKERCONV: Generating Multimodal Empathetic Responses from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01679/) (2024)
- [CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08845/) (2022)
- [Don't Lose Yourself! Empathetic Response Generation via Explicit Self-Other Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03884/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Being Kind Isn't Always Being Safe: Diagnosing Affective Hallucination in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16921/) (2025)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06736/) (2025)
- [ES4R: Speech Encoding Based on Prepositive Affective Modeling for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16225/) (2026)
- [PRISM: Prosody-Integrated Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Empathetic Spoken Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12902/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Empathetic conversation is a crucial characteristic in daily conversations between individuals. Nowadays, Large Language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance in generating empathetic responses. Knowledge bases like COMET can assist LLMs in mitigating illusions and enhancing the understanding of users' intentions and emotions. However, models remain heavily reliant on fixed knowledge bases and unrestricted incorporation of external knowledge can introduce noise. Tool learning is a flexible end-to-end approach that assists LLMs in handling complex problems. In this paper, we propose Emotional Knowledge Tool Calling (EKTC) framework, which encapsulates the commonsense knowledge bases as empathetic tools, enabling LLMs to integrate external knowledge flexibly through tool calling. In order to adapt the models to the new task, we construct a novel dataset TOOL-ED based on the EMPATHETICMPATHETIC DIALOGUE (ED) dataset. We validate EKTC on the ED dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that our framework can enhance the ability of LLMs to generate empathetic responses effectively.