Concept · 44 episode(s)

Tool Use

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Definition

Tool use is the model’s ability to call external functions — a calculator, a search engine, a code interpreter, an API — and use the results in its response. It’s what turns a chat model into something that can actually act in the world.

Episodes covering this

  1. 208
    The Blank Space in Your AI Approval Box That Isn't Empty
    Unicode TAG-Block Concealment of Tool-Metadata Payloads in the Model Context Protocol: An Approval-View Fidelity Gap Across Three Independent Server Implementations
    · ·15 min·Jul 08, 2026
  2. 202
    How Do You Know an AI Agent Actually Refused? Check the World, Not the Words
    Safety Testing LLM Agents at Scale: From Risk Discovery to Evidence-Grounded Verification
    Feng, Lin, Wen et al. · AntGroup / Hunan Institute of Advanced Technology·18 min·Jul 06, 2026
  3. 195
    Why 'Be Careful' Does Nothing for AI Coding Agents, and What Does
    Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions
    Ji, Zhang, Xu et al. · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology·15 min·Jul 03, 2026
  4. 194
    How a Robot Builds a Debugging Notebook It Can Read, Edit, and Hand to Another Robot
    ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics
    Lu, Wu, Kou et al. · NVIDIA·24 min·Jul 02, 2026
  5. 192
    A 32B Open Model Matched Frontier Systems By Learning to Take Notes
    AutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive Skill
    Wu, Zhu, Zhang et al. · Stanford University·22 min·Jul 02, 2026
  6. 190
    The Skill Every AI Manager Is Missing: Handing Out Exactly the Right Keys
    ClawArena-Team: Benchmarking Subagent Orchestration and Dynamic Workflows in Language-Model Agents
    Xiong, Ji, Qiu et al. · UNC Chapel Hill·21 min·Jul 02, 2026
  7. 187
    An 8-Billion Agent That Beats Models 80 Times Its Size By Looking Things Up
    An AI agent for treatment reasoning over a biomedical tool universe
    Gao, Noori, Zhu et al. · Department of Biomedical Informatics·19 min·Jun 30, 2026
  8. 184
    An AI Built an Undetectable Secret Channel, And Another AI Couldn't Find It
    Tool Use Enables Undetectable Steganography in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
    Rippin, Marshall, Africa et al. · Oxford University·19 min·Jun 30, 2026
  9. 181
    How to Backpropagate Blame Through a Team of Chatbots — And When It Backfires
    GBC: Gradient-Based Connections for Optimizing Multi-Agent Systems
    Yang, Alrabah, Hakkani-Tür et al. · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign·20 min·Jun 29, 2026
  10. 175
    One Crosscoder Feature Flips a Stalling Chatbot Into a Working Agent
    Localizing RL-Induced Tool Use to a Single Crosscoder Feature
    Shportko, Bhokare, AlZahrani et al. · Northwestern University·26 min·Jun 26, 2026
  11. 170
    When a One-Liner Beats Your Agent's Clever Verification Logic
    Bayesian control for coding agents
    Papamarkou, Smirnov, Mazanov et al. · PolyShape / National Technical University of Athens·26 min·Jun 24, 2026
  12. 169
    Why Better Bug Reports Can Make AI Coding Agents Worse
    SHERLOC: Structured Diagnostic Localization for Code Repair Agents
    Tamoyan, Narenthiran, Arakelyan et al. · NVIDIA / TU Darmstadt·24 min·Jun 24, 2026
  13. 168
    When Turning Experience Into Code Makes Your AI Agent Dumber
    Metis: Bridging Text and Code Memory for Self-Evolving Agents
    Dai, He, Li et al. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong·27 min·Jun 24, 2026
  14. 167
    How Teaching an AI to Predict, Not Act, Made It a Better Actor
    Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents
    Team, Zuo, Xiao et al. · ·27 min·Jun 24, 2026
  15. 161
    A Robot That Plays Before You Give It a Job, And Why That Beats Retrying
    Playful Agentic Robot Learning
    Zhang, Ge, Yoo et al. · University of California·19 min·Jun 19, 2026
  16. 157
    When an AI Coding Agent Drives a Phone Through the Terminal, No Screen Needed
    Beyond the GUI Paradigm: Do Mobile Agents Need the Phone Screen?
    Gu, Jiang, Guo et al. · Mila–Québec AI Institute / Concordia University·24 min·Jun 19, 2026
  17. 150
    Don't Kill the Loser: A Different Way to Handle Two AI Agents Colliding
    CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems
    Lyu, Zhang, Wu et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·32 min·Jun 16, 2026
  18. 147
    Agents Fail at the Body, Not the Brain: A Self-Rewriting Scaffold That Lifts a 9B Model 44 Points
    HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry
    Chen, Lu, Zhao et al. · ·30 min·Jun 15, 2026
  19. 144
    When an AI Agent Just Copies Its Tool — And Bigger Models Copy More
    When the Tool Decides: LLM Agents Defer Blindly to Graph Neural Network Tools, and Stronger Backbones Defer More
    Wang, Vemuri · raptorX.ai·15 min·Jun 15, 2026
  20. 142
    Training a Tiny Model to Run the Plumbing Between an Agent and the World
    HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness
    Wang, Wang, Taylor et al. · University of California·24 min·Jun 12, 2026
  21. 123
    Five Identical Worlds, One Swapped Model: What Happens When AI Agents Run for Fifteen Days
    Emergence World: A Platform for Evaluating Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Autonomy
    Akkil, Kokku, Vikram et al. · Emergence AI·30 min·Jun 09, 2026
  22. 120
    How an AI Agent Rewrites Its Own Tools, Without an Answer Key
    Retrospective Harness Optimization: Improving LLM Agents via Self-Preference over Trajectory Rollouts
    Pan, Liu, Lin et al. · City University of Hong Kong·30 min·Jun 05, 2026
  23. 110
    How an Agent Got 44 Points Better by Mining Its Own Scratch Paper
    Inducing Reasoning Primitives from Agent Traces
    Lei, Yan, Momo et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·27 min·Jun 03, 2026
  24. 108
    The Reasoning Cliff: Why Thinking Longer Makes Models Worse at Exact Step-by-Step Tasks
    The Deterministic Horizon: When Extended Reasoning Fails and Tool Delegation Becomes Necessary
    Guo, Wu, Yiu · The University of Hong Kong·32 min·Jun 03, 2026
  25. 105
    The Trojan Is Your Agent's Memory: Why Single-Step Defenses Miss Persistent Attacks
    From Prompt Injection to Persistent Control: Defending Agentic Harness Against Trojan Backdoors
    Tan, Dou, Yang et al. · Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence·26 min·Jun 01, 2026
  26. 104
    How Making a Research Agent Smarter Quietly Makes It Leak Your Secrets
    MosaicLeaks:Privacy Risks in Querying-in-the-Open for Deep Research Agents
    Gurung, Gella, Drouin et al. · University of Edinburgh·25 min·Jun 01, 2026
  27. 100
    How a Prompt Wrapper Lets a Frontier Model Play Poker Like an Expert
    PokerSkill: LLMs Can Play Expert-Level Poker without Training or Solvers
    Li, Wang, Huang · IIIS·29 min·May 29, 2026
  28. 097
    Same Tokens, Same Cost, Wildly Different Results: What Actually Scales in AI Agents
    Scaling Laws for Agent Harnesses via Effective Feedback Compute
    Zhang, Wang, Xu et al. · Harbin Institute of Technology·25 min·May 29, 2026
  29. 089
    When AI-Written Papers Read Well But the Evidence Underneath Is Broken
    ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence
    Meng, Mishra, Chen et al. · Google Cloud AI Research·32 min·May 27, 2026
  30. 067
    An AI Just Solved a 1996 Erdős Problem—and the Simplest Agent Won
    Advancing Mathematics Research with AI-Driven Formal Proof Search
    Tsoukalas, Kovsharov, Shirobokov et al. · Google DeepMind·31 min·May 22, 2026
  31. 066
    Why Giving an AI Agent More Tools Can Make It Worse at Using a Computer
    ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agents
    Hu, Zhang, Xu et al. · Tongyi Lab·26 min·May 22, 2026
  32. 063
    Why Web Agents Are Slow: A Compiler-Style Fix for Computer-Use Latency
    Agent JIT Compilation for Latency-Optimizing Web Agent Planning and Scheduling
    Winston, Wang, Mirhoseini et al. · Stanford University·26 min·May 21, 2026
  33. 062
    Treating Hallucinations as Exploits: A Gate-Based Architecture for Agent Safety
    Hallucination as Exploit: Evidence-Carrying Multimodal Agents
    Zhang, Zheng, Yang · Shenzhen University·24 min·May 20, 2026
  34. 059
    Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
    Firefly: Illuminating Large-Scale Verified Tool-Call Data Generation from Real APIs
    Lu, Wang, Lu et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 20, 2026
  35. 057
    How Uber Caught 206 Leaked Credentials With an LLM-Powered Security Stack
    ADR: An Agentic Detection System for Enterprise Agentic AI Security
    Li, Hu, Xu et al. · Uber Technologies·28 min·May 19, 2026
  36. 040
    Two Frozen Models Learn to Whisper: Coupling Through Hidden States
    The Bicameral Model: Bidirectional Hidden-State Coupling Between Parallel Language Models
    Flamant, Ghai, Shimizu · AWS Agentic AI·29 min·May 13, 2026
  37. 039
    When Smarter Agents Get Fooled by Three Extra Nodes in a Database
    Oracle Poisoning: Corrupting Knowledge Graphs to Weaponise AI Agent Reasoning
    Kereopa-Yorke, Diaz, Wright et al. · Microsoft·31 min·May 12, 2026
  38. 035
    Why Frontier Agents Ask for Clarification at Exactly the Wrong Moment
    Ask Early, Ask Late, Ask Right: When Does Clarification Timing Matter for Long-Horizon Agents?
    Gulati, Gupta, Lumer et al. · PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S.·29 min·May 11, 2026
  39. 029
    Why Forty-Eight Percent on FrontierMath Isn't the Real Story in DeepMind's New Math Paper
    AI Co-Mathematician: Accelerating Mathematicians with Agentic AI
    Zheng, Glehn, Zwols et al. · Google DeepMind·20 min·May 08, 2026
  40. 024
    An AI Agent That Found 28 Zero-Days in Windows — And What Made It Work
    Agentic Vulnerability Reasoning on Windows COM Binaries
    Lee, Kim, Zhang · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign·22 min·May 07, 2026
  41. 021
    Ten Thousand Examples Beat the Full Industrial Pipeline for Search Agents
    OpenSeeker-v2: Pushing the Limits of Search Agents with Informative and High-Difficulty Trajectories
    Du, Ye, Tang et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·14 min·May 06, 2026
  42. 020
    The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No
    The Compliance Gap: Why AI Systems Promise to Follow Process Instructions but Don't
    Shin · Polymath Minds AI Lab·28 min·May 06, 2026
  43. 016
    Why Your Coding Agent Stalls While the GPU Runs Hot
    MARS: Efficient, Adaptive Co-Scheduling for Heterogeneous Agentic Systems
    Wang, Ye, Xu et al. · Duke University·24 min·May 03, 2026
  44. 011
    When RL Actually Teaches Agents Something New, And When It Doesn't
    Does RL Expand the Capability Boundary of LLM Agents? A PASS@(k,T) Analysis
    Zhai, Yan, Shao et al. · Fudan University·23 min·May 02, 2026

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