mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SING: Synthetic Intention Graph for Scalable Active Tool Discovery in LLM Agents

arXiv 2606.16591 ↗First posted 15 Jun 2026cs.CLcited by 4

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Tool learning and function calling

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on agent harnesses that manage context, tools, and multi-turn execution, making tools a central interface for acting in realistic digital environments. As harness-connected tool ecosystems expand to hundreds or thousands of APIs, services, and task-specific skills, exhaustive tool schema injection becomes costly and imposes a closed-world assumption that limits agents to a predefined static inventory. Retrieval-augmented tool selection offers a natural alternative, but existing one-shot retrieval methods often fail to align isolated tool descriptions with the agent's true task intention, especially in long-horizon tasks where required capabilities emerge through decomposition, observations, and newly induced subgoals. We propose SING, an intention-aware active tool discovery framework that builds an intention-tool graph linking user intentions, tool capabilities, and tool collaboration patterns, and dynamically retrieves tools according to evolving task states. Using a unified corpus of 7,471 tools, we evaluate SING on three real-world tool-use benchmarks. SING improves Global Recall@5 by up to 59.8% and downstream success rate by up to 28.9% over baselines, while reducing full-corpus tool-schema exposure by 99.8%, demonstrating that intention-aware graph structure enables more accurate and context-efficient tool discovery in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 24 of its 47 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

Builds on

24 of 47 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Model Context Protocol (MCP) Tool Descriptions Are Smelly! Towards Improving AI Agent Efficiency with Augmented MCP Tool Descriptions16 Feb
  2. 2025MCPAgentBench: A Real-world Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agent MCP Tool Use31 Dec
  3. 2025MCP-Flow: Facilitating LLM Agents to Master Real-World, Diverse and Scaling MCP Tools28 Oct
  4. 2025TOUCAN: Synthesizing 1.5M Tool-Agentic Data from Real-World MCP Environments1 Oct
  5. 2025MCP-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Using LLM Agents with Complex Real-World Tasks via MCP Servers28 Aug
  6. 2025MCP-Zero: Active Tool Discovery for Autonomous LLM Agents1 Jun
  7. 2024Efficient and Scalable Estimation of Tool Representations in Vector Space2 Sep
  8. 2024AnyTool: Self-Reflective, Hierarchical Agents for Large-Scale API Calls6 Feb
  9. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs31 Jul
  10. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs24 May
  11. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools9 Feb

Other references · 13

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  3. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,383
  4. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  5. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,134
  6. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 877
  7. 2025ReTool: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Tool Use in LLMscited by 377
  8. 2025ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needscited by 342
  9. 2025Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Surveycited by 38
  10. 2025MCPToolBench++: A Large Scale AI Agent Model Context Protocol MCP Tool Use Benchmarkcited by 30
  11. 2026WildClawBench: A Benchmark for Real-World, Long-Horizon Agent Evaluationcited by 29
  12. 2024User Intent Recognition and Satisfaction with Large Language Models: A User Study with ChatGPTcited by 19
1 more
  1. 2024Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modelingcited by 6

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.

4 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025GRETEL: A Goal-driven Retrieval and Execution-based Trial Framework for LLM Tool Selection Enhancing
  2. 2026Tools Are Not Islands: Set-Level Tool Retrieval for LLM Agents via Query-Conditioned Hyperedge Prediction
  3. 2026OpaqueToolsBench: Learning Nuances of Tool Behavior Through Interaction
  4. 2026ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution
  5. 2026ToolAtlas: Learning Once, Reusing Everywhere with Tool-Side Memory
  6. 2026HyperAgent: Planning and Acting over Tool-Schema Hypergraphs for Tool-Use LLM Agents
  7. 2026UniToolCall: Unifying Tool-Use Representation, Data, and Evaluation for LLM Agents
  8. 2026Lomekwi: Resource-Bounded Tool Discovery in LLM Agents