@inproceedings{lu-etal-2026-octotools,
    title = "{O}cto{T}ools: A Multi-Agent Framework with Extensible Tools for Complex Reasoning",
    author = "Lu, Pan  and
      Chen, Bowen  and
      Liu, Sheng  and
      Thapa, Rahul  and
      Boen, Joseph  and
      Zou, James",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1/",
    pages = "1--86",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Solving complex reasoning tasks may involve visual understanding, domain knowledge retrieval, numerical calculation, and multi-step reasoning. Existing methods augment large language models (LLMs) with external tools but are restricted to specialized domains, limited tool types, or require additional training data. In this paper, we introduce OctoTools, a training-free, user-friendly, and easily extensible multi-agent framework designed to tackle complex reasoning across diverse domains. OctoTools introduces standardized tool cards to encapsulate tool functionality, a planner for both high-level and low-level planning, and an executor to carry out tool usage. We validate OctoTools' generality across 16 diverse tasks (including MathVista, MMLU-Pro, MedQA, and GAIA-Text), achieving substantial average accuracy gains of 9.3{\%} over GPT-4o. Furthermore, OctoTools also outperforms AutoGen, GPT-Functions, and LangChain by up to 10.6{\%} when given the same set of tools. Through comprehensive analysi, ablations, and robustness tests with compact backbones and noisy tool environments, OctoTools demonstrates advantages in task planning, effective tool usage, and multi-step problem solving. Code, demos, and visualization are publicly available at \url{https://octotools.github.io/}."
}