ToolChoiceConfusion: Causal Minimal Tool Filtering for Reliable LLM Agents

Rahul Suresh Babu; Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer

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arXiv · 2606.06284

ToolChoiceConfusion: Causal Minimal Tool Filtering for Reliable LLM Agents

Rahul Suresh Babu·Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer

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Abstract

Large language model agents increasingly rely on external tools, but larger tool menus can reduce reliability and efficiency by increasing wrong-tool calls, premature actions, and token cost. Existing tool-selection methods often optimize semantic relevance, exposing tools whose names or descriptions match the user request. We argue that relevance is insufficient: a tool may be related to the task while still being unnecessary or premature at the current step. We propose Causal Minimal Tool Filtering (CMTF), a training-free method that selects tools by causal sufficiency. CMTF uses lightweight precondition-effect contracts to expose only the minimal next-step tool frontier needed to advance from the current state toward the user goal. Across multi-step tool-use tasks, we compare CMTF with all-tools exposure, keyword retrieval, state-aware filtering, and causal-path ablations, measuring task success, wrong-tool calls, premature actions, tool exposure, and token cost. In the main benchmark with 102 tasks, 100 tools, four LLM backends, and 2448 task-method-model runs, CMTF matches the strongest causal baseline in aggregate success while reducing visible tools from 100 to one per step and reducing token usage by about 90% relative to all-tools exposure.

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BibTeX RIS

Rahul Suresh Babu, Laxmipriya Ganesh Iyer. 2026-06-04. ToolChoiceConfusion: Causal Minimal Tool Filtering for Reliable LLM Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06284

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