Learning to Ask: When LLM Agents Meet Unclear Instruction

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission5181 Authors

Abstract:

Equipped with the capability to call functions, modern LLM agents can leverage external tools for addressing a range of tasks unattainable through language skills alone.
However, the effective execution of these tools relies heavily not just on the advanced capabilities of LLM agents but also on precise user instructions, which often cannot be ensured in the real world.
To evaluate the performance of LLM agents tool-use under imperfect instructions, we meticulously examine the real-world instructions queried from users, analyze the error patterns, and build a challenging tool-use benchmark called Noisy ToolBench.
We find that due to the next-token prediction training objective, LLM agents tend to arbitrarily generate the missed argument, which may lead to hallucinations and risks.
To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Ask-when-Needed, which prompts LLM agents to ask questions to users whenever they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions.
Moreover, to reduce the manual labor involved in user-LLM interaction and assess LLM agents' performance in tool utilization from both accuracy and efficiency perspectives, we design an automated evaluation tool named ToolEvaluator.
Our experiments demonstrate that the Ask-when-Needed significantly outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the Noisy ToolBench.
We will release all related code and datasets to support future research.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: code generation and understanding, applications, robustness

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5181