Tool use / function calling
Toolformer
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
Superseded baseline#8 of 55 most-superseded · first seen Feb 9, 2023
Superseded — cited as a baseline and beaten by newer methods
2 papers critique it · 1 beat it on benchmarks
What papers say
Verbatim critique sentences, each from a paper that cites Toolformer as a baseline.
Toolformer~Toolformer focuses on when to invoke tools rather than reasoning about fine-grained tool costs or long-term expenditure.
“These studies substantially advance reasoning control and tool-use alignment, but they generally treat reasoning depth and execution structure as separate concerns rather than as jointly case-conditioned aspects of the same problem.”
Beaten on benchmarks
Head-to-head results where a newer method reports beating Toolformer. Values are copied from the source paper's tables — verify against the cited paper.
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-CAST beats Toolformer
79.43 vs 22.11
ToolBench Win · [Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct]
Case-Based Calibration of Adaptive Reasoning and Execution for LLM Tool Use
What to use instead
Recent methods in the same sub-problem, not yet superseded in the knowledge base — arXiv benchmark leaders, not vetted production recommendations.