Apple Studies Plan-then-Retrieve vs Retrieve-then-Plan for LLM Tool Discovery
Apple researchers compared two architectures for tool-augmented LLM agents selecting APIs from large registries. The dominant Retrieve-then-Plan approach embeds the user query and retrieves similar tools via approximate nearest-neighbor search. An alternative Plan-then-Retrieve paradigm has the LLM first generate Abstract Tool Stubs, hypothesized function signatures describing needed capabilities, which then serve as retrieval queries against the registry.
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