locally-deployed-open-weight-models-driving-stateful-dependency-ordered-mcp-toolFor locally deployed open-weight models driving a stateful, dependency-ordered MCP tool server, cutting tool descriptions from full specifications (purpose, parameter semantics, constraints, failure conditions) down to one sentence each raises the fraction of calls the server rejects for every model tested, while its effect on task coverage is less consistent.
Ingested from a paper but not yet reviewed by a human. It is deliberately inert: it does not move any technique’s standing, does not count toward the backtest, and is excluded anywhere a claim would carry weight. Read the source before relying on it.
Capability: Using the tools it is given
Observed on
Seven 4-bit quantised open models (8B-31B) run through Ollama on an expert-informed hardware-design benchmark of 14 tools; single-agent ReAct loop with other configuration held fix.
Sources
- Measured as tool failure rate under matched configurations; the paper reports TFR rises for every model and roughly doubles for most, and comprehensive descriptions win in 35 of 42 model-suite best configurations. No absolute per-model numbers given for the ablation, and only one tool set of 14 tools on a proprietary replica server.
Disagreeing is the most useful thing you can do here. Both sides of every contested claim in this catalog were assembled by the same person, which is its weakest point.
Related claims
- A linear probe on a tool-calling model's hidden state at the last generated token detects incorrect tool-calls — including wrong-but-well-typed argument values that parsers and logs do not catch — and works better on larger models and at middle-to-late layers than at the final layer.Using the tools it is given · unreviewed
- For long-horizon tool-calling agents (tasks needing five or more calls), embedding state-transition cues — preconditions, invariants, completion states — into the descriptions of the tools on the intended chain is what actually steers the agent's trajectory; runtime corrective text appended to tool results only patches residual drift, and the plausible user prompt alone (persona, deadlines, format constraints) does not establish the trajectory at all.Following instructions hidden in data · unreviewed
- When an agent must work over a very large tool catalogue, wrapping each tool in a natural-language interface that resolves the API schema internally — so raw schemas are retrieved on demand rather than enumerated in the model's prompt — contributes more to multi-step tool- call success than the surrounding planner, router, or verifier stages.Using the tools it is given · unreviewed
- On repository-level issue-fixing tasks (SWE-bench Lite/Verified/Pro), spending effort upstream — expanding the issue text into a structured requirement spec from retrieved repo context, then testing and refining that spec via generated code and tests — raises resolve rate over agents that consume the raw issue description, and raises the share of patches that even apply cleanly by a larger margin than it raises correctness.Generating and editing working code · unreviewed
- On multi-turn tool-calling benchmarks that score whether the final environment state matches a gold trajectory, aggregate accuracy hides wrong action-class choices: a model can call a withheld or under-specified tool with fabricated arguments, be handed the missing piece on a later turn, and still be graded PASS — so heavily tool-trained model families rank high while almost never asking for a missing parameter or refusing an unavailable function.Whether the measurement made the finding · unreviewed
Notes
Drafted from the paper by a model and filed unreviewed. Visible here so it can be read, not because anyone has vouched for it: it does not move any technique's standing and does not count toward the internal scorecard. Drafted confidence: medium. Falsifier as drafted: An ablation on comparable stateful tool benchmarks where minimal one-sentence descriptions leave the tool failure rate unchanged or lower than comprehensive descriptions across models. Drafted stance toward shows-llms-hallucinate-api-names-arguments-when-calling: supports -- Both find that giving the model detailed tool documentation reduces malformed or invalid calls.