AI & ML
Advertising to Agents: Measuring Description-Framing Bias in LLM Tool Selection
arXiv cs.IR0 views
arXiv:2605.23916v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI agents often pick tools from registries, where each provider writes its tool's description; we ask whether sales language there changes which tool an agent picks. We built pairs of listings that differ in one way (praise, a verifiable specification, or list order) and asked two OpenAI models to call one tool. In a preregistered study, stacked praise (four kinds) raised a tool's pick rate by about 43 percentage points, matching or beating a verifiable specification. Praise also pulled some picks toward tools whose numeric limit was too small. With identical listings, the first-listed tool was picked about 72 points more often. Structured fields helped agents pick the capable tool; sales text beside them reduced or erased that gain. An exploratory study of five models shows the same direction; a "Sponsored" label dampened it, and a system-prompt warning moved one model. Registries could list limits as fields, hide sales text from agents, and randomize order. Stacked praise replicated on held-out domains; no single kind did after correcting for multiple tests. Preregistered results are provisional until blind phrase ratings are complete, and cover two small models.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23916PreviousTool Recommendation for Multi-Step Agents: Finding Every Tool a Task NeedsNextKGVoyager: Knowledge Graph Agnostic Question Answering via Agentic Navigation
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