Abstract

LLM agents operating over massive, dynamic tool libraries rely on effective retrieval, yet standard single-shot dense retrievers struggle with complex requests. These failures primarily stem from the disconnect between abstract user goals and technical documentation, and the limited capacity of fixed-size embeddings to model combinatorial tool compositions. To address these challenges, we propose ToolQP, a lightweight framework that models retrieval as iterative query planning. Instead of single-shot matching, ToolQP decomposes instructions into sub-tasks and dynamically generates queries to interact with the retriever, effectively bridging the semantic gap by targeting the specific sub-tasks required for composition. We train ToolQP using synthetic query trajectories followed by optimization with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Experiments demonstrate that ToolQP achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting superior zero-shot generalization, robustness across diverse retrievers, and significant improvements in downstream agentic execution.