Semantic Tool Router

Dynamic runtime tool discovery and retrieval-augmented routing for AI agents.

Semantic Tool Router is a dependency-light library designed to manage the "Many-Tool" problem in LLM and Agentic workflows. Instead of exposing every available tool or Model Context Protocol (MCP) server schema to a model context window (which increases costs and degrades accuracy), it embeds tools based on their descriptions and dynamically retrieves a focused candidate set ($top-k$) for the current task.

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When to use this

Use Semantic Tool Router when…	Skip it when…
You have 20+ tools or multiple MCP servers	You have fewer than ~10 tools — pass them all
Prompt token cost or context limits matter	You need guaranteed correctness without retrieval risk
You want measurable routing before trusting an agent	Every tool must always be visible to the model
You need permission-aware filtering (read, write, destructive)	Tool schemas are identical and interchangeable

This is a preprocessing layer for LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom agent loops — not another orchestration framework.

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How It Works

graph LR
    Query[Task Query] --> Router(Tool Router)
    Registry[Tool Registry] --> Router
    Router --> Filters{Filters}
    Filters --> LLM[LLM Context]

1. Tool Indexing: Tool descriptions, schemas, tags, examples, and permissions are compiled into search strings and vectorized.
2. Semantic Matching: The user query is embedded and compared against the indexed tools using cosine similarity.
3. Metadata Filtering: Results are filtered by permission layers (e.g. read-only vs destructive commands) or specific tags.
4. Context Injection: Only the top $k$ relevant tool schemas are injected into the LLM system prompt, preserving context tokens.

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Features

• ⚡ Zero-Dependency Hashing Baseline: Comes with a local token-hashing vectorizer (HashingEmbeddingProvider) that runs instantly without external APIs or PyTorch downloads.
• 🔌 First-Class MCP Client: Connects to live Stdio MCP servers, imports schemas automatically, and executes selected tools under expectation guards.
• 🏷️ Metadata-Aware Filtering: Apply rigid tag filters or restrict tools based on security permissions (read, write, execute, destructive, network).
• 📈 Evaluation Suite: Measure retrieval metrics (hit_rate@k, top_1_accuracy, MRR, context_tokens_saved) against reproducible benchmark files.
• 🧠 Swappable Embedders: Easily swap the hashing provider for local Hugging Face SentenceTransformers or cloud APIs (OpenAI).
• 🔀 Hybrid BM25 + embeddings: Fuses lexical and semantic scores (default 40% BM25) for tool names that do not overlap with the query.
• 🛡️ Read-query safety penalties: Demotes destructive and write-only tools when the task looks read-only.

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Installation

Install the core package (includes standard hashing retriever):

pip install semantic-tool-router

Optional extras for advanced embeddings:

# Local models via SentenceTransformers
pip install semantic-tool-router[sentence-transformers]

# OpenAI hosted embedding models
pip install semantic-tool-router[openai]

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Quick Start

1. Basic Tool Discovery

Query a local JSON registry of tool specs:

python -m semantic_tool_router discover "read the project README file" --registry examples/tools.json

For production-quality routing, use the quality profile (MiniLM embeddings + cross-encoder reranking):

python -m semantic_tool_router discover "generate a mock logo" \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --profile quality

Or configure embedders manually:

python -m semantic_tool_router discover "generate a mock logo" \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --embedder sentence-transformers \
  --embedding-model all-MiniLM-L6-v2 \
  --reranker cross-encoder

Profile	Stack	Best for
fast (default)	Hashing + BM25	CI, air-gapped, zero-deps
quality	MiniLM + cross-encoder	Balanced production routing
bge	BGE-small embeddings	Best live MCP accuracy (94.1% hit@3)

2. Live MCP Routing

Connect to a live filesystem MCP server, dynamically retrieve the top-3 candidate tools matching your task, and execute the selected tool with safety parameters:

python -m semantic_tool_router mcp-discover \
  "read the first lines of the project README" \
  --top-k 3 \
  --profile quality \
  --allow-permission read \
  --expect-tool read_text_file \
  --call-argument "path=README.md" \
  --call-argument "head=8" \
  --server npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem .

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Integrations

Use the router as a preprocessing step inside standard orchestrator loops to save prompt tokens:

• LangChain Agent Integration: See the langchain_integration.py template.
• LlamaIndex Agent Integration: See the llamaindex_integration.py template.

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Benchmarking & Evaluation

Evaluate your router configuration on fixture datasets:

python -m semantic_tool_router benchmark \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --tasks benchmarks/tasks.json \
  --top-k 3

Compare retrievers on the frozen fixture and live MCP suites:

python -m semantic_tool_router compare-retrievers \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --tasks benchmarks/tasks.json \
  --suite benchmarks/live_mcp_suite.json \
  --markdown-output benchmarks/results/comparison.md

Retrieval input ablation:

python -m semantic_tool_router ablation \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --tasks benchmarks/tasks.json \
  --markdown-output benchmarks/results/ablation.md

Downstream agent evaluation:

python -m semantic_tool_router agent-eval \
  --registry examples/tools.json \
  --tasks benchmarks/tasks.json \
  --profile quality \
  --selector rank1

# Live MCP suite (51 tasks)
python -m semantic_tool_router agent-eval \
  --live \
  --suite benchmarks/live_mcp_suite.json \
  --profile bge \
  --markdown-output benchmarks/results/agent_eval_live.md

Use --fixture-only for a fast CI-friendly run without MCP servers.

Latest results: benchmarks/results/comparison.md — 51 live MCP tasks with --profile bge + tool enrichment: 98.0% hit@3, 92.2% top-1.

Research artifacts:

• Input ablation
• Agent evaluation
• End-to-end demo notebook

To run the reproducible baseline benchmark suite across four official live MCP reference servers (Filesystem, Memory, Sequential Thinking, and Everything):

python -m semantic_tool_router mcp-benchmark \
  --suite benchmarks/live_mcp_suite.json \
  --workspace . \
  --markdown-output benchmarks/results/live_mcp_baseline.md

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Testing

Run unit tests locally across mock registry and MCP environments:

python -m unittest discover -s tests

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Contributing & Development

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md, docs/benchmark-contributing.md, and docs/research-plan.md.

1. Fork the repo and clone locally.
2. Setup tests: python -m pip install -e .[sentence-transformers,openai]
3. Ensure CI checks pass: python -m unittest discover -s tests
4. If you change retrieval behavior, run compare-retrievers and include before/after numbers in your PR.

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License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.