arXiv AI

Learning When Not to Act: Mitigating Tool Abuse in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 02132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning can induce tool abuse, where models overuse external tools even for queries solvable by internal reasoning.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

HiDiffTIR: Hierarchical Difficulty-Aware Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning

arXiv:2608.21863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) is a fundamental capability for LLM agents to solve complex tasks by interacting with external tools iteratively. Rei...

By Yucan Guo, Xiaohan Wang, Miao Su, Saiping Guan, Zhongni Hou, Jiajun Chai, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Agent0: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents from Zero Data via Tool-Integrated Reasoning

Agent0 is a fully autonomous framework that enables large language model agents to evolve without external data by using a multi‑step co‑evolution process. It pits a curriculum agent against an executor agent, both derived from the same base LLM, where the curriculum agent creates increasingly challenging tasks and the executor learns to solve them. By integrating external tools into the executor’s workflow, the system creates a self‑reinforcing cycle that continuously generates high‑quality curricula, leading to significant gains in reasoning performance—an 18% improvement on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning for the Qwen3‑8B‑Base model.

By Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu, Can Qin, Fang Wu, Yiyang Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv AI
Jul 20

ToolVerse: Unlocking Massive Environments and Long-Horizon Tasks for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 15660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While LLM agents demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in compact and well-defined scenarios, they struggle to maintain robustness and effectiveness when faced with large-scale, diverse, and dynamic real-world environments that demand seamless tool integration.

By Shuaiyu Zhou, Fengpeng Yue, Zengjie Hu, Yuanzhe Shen, Chenyang Zhang, feng hong, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Spurious Tool Use: When RL Agents Learn the Wrong Reason to Act

The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.

By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv AI
Sep 18

UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

UnifiedPlayers is a cooperative framework that jointly adapts planning, execution, and evaluation for tool-integrated reinforcement learning agents. It consists of a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that creates multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that builds executable verifiers, all coordinated by role‑specific rewards under GRPO. The approach outperforms prior baselines on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks and yields a verifier with high adversarial detection accuracy and more discriminative reward signals.

By Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao