What Are Tools Anyway? A Survey from the Language Model Perspective
Zhiruo Wang Zhoujun Cheng Hao Zhu Daniel Fried Graham Neubig
Language models (LMs) are powerful yet mostly for text generation tasks.
Tools have substantially enhanced their performance for tasks that require
complex skills. However, many works adopt the term "tool" in different ways,
raising the question: What is a tool anyway? Subsequently, where and how do
tools help LMs? In this survey, we provide a unified definition of tools as
external programs used by LMs, and perform a systematic review of LM tooling
scenarios and approaches. Grounded on this review, we empirically study the
efficiency of various tooling methods by measuring their required compute and
performance gains on various benchmarks, and highlight some challenges and
potential future research in the field.