# Repairing Tool Calls Using Post-tool Execution Reflection and RAG

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17874 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17874/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 11 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Tool learning and function calling](https://mlsanity.com/agents/tool-learning-and-function-calling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [TRAIL: Trace Reasoning and Agentic Issue Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08638/) (2025)
- [CodeRAG-Bench: Can Retrieval Augment Code Generation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14497/) (2024)
- [Empowering LLMs with Logical Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15652/) (2025)
- [NESTFUL: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Nested Sequences of API Calls](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03797/) (2024)
- [Tools Fail: Detecting Silent Errors in Faulty Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19228/) (2024)
- [Toolshed: Scale Tool-Equipped Agents with Advanced RAG-Tool Fusion and Tool Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14594/) (2024)
- [ToolScan: A Benchmark for Characterizing Errors in Tool-Use LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13547/) (2024)
- [RAPGen: An Approach for Fixing Code Inefficiencies in Zero-Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17077/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic systems interact with external systems by calling tools such as Python functions, REST API endpoints, or command line tools such as kubectl in Kubernetes. These tool calls often fail for various syntactic and semantic reasons. Some less obvious semantic errors can only be identified and resolved after analyzing the tool's response. To repair these errors, we develop a post-tool execution reflection component that combines large language model (LLM)-based reflection with domain-specific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) using documents describing both the specific tool being called and troubleshooting documents related to the tool. For this paper, we focus on the use case of the kubectl command line tool to manage Kubernetes, a platform for orchestrating cluster applications. Through a larger empirical study and a smaller manual evaluation, we find that our RAG-based reflection will repair kubectl commands such that they are both more likely to successfully execute (pass rate) for 55% of our models evaluated and 36% more likely to correctly answer the user query on average. We find that troubleshooting documents improve pass rate compared to official documentation by an average of 10%.