Although LLM-based agents are proven to master tool orchestration in scientific fields, particularly chemistry, their single-task performance remains limited by underlying tool constraints. To this end, we propose tool amplification, a novel paradigm that enhances the collective capabilities of specialized tools through optimized, dynamic coordination within individual tasks. Instantiating this paradigm, we introduce ChemAmp, a computationally lightweight framework that dynamically treats chemistry tools (e.g., UniMol2, Chemformer) as composable building-block agents. It constructs task-specialized super-agents that transcend atomic tool constraints with limited data (≤10 samples). Our evaluations across four core chemistry tasks molecular design, molecule captioning, reaction prediction, and property prediction demonstrate that ChemAmp outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. Critically, this bottom-up construction strategy enables 94\% inference token cost reductions versus vanilla multi-agent systems.
@article{arxiv.2505.21569,
title = {ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents},
author = {Zhucong Li and Powei Chang and Jin Xiao and Zhijian Zhou and Qianyu He and Jiaqing Liang and Fenglei Cao and Xu Yinghui and Yuan Qi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21569},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Accepted to ACL 2026 Findings ; Code available at https://github.com/Chang-pw/ChemAmp