The paper presents a method for training small language models to select appropriate tools for complex, multi-step user instructions, addressing the challenge of handling large tool corpora. By using reinforcement learning, a Qwen3-8B model is trained to perform tool selection, achieving performance that surpasses a 402‑billion‑parameter Llama‑4‑Maverick model on the ToolBench benchmark. The trained model also demonstrates transferability to different retrievers and generalization across new tool domains.
arXiv:2607. 05441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating external tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accomplishing complex tasks.
By Lorenzo Molfetta, Giacomo Frisoni, Nicol\`o Monaldini, Gianluca Moro
The paper introduces SMITH, a reinforcement learning framework that jointly trains large language models to create and use tools within a single policy. By alternating between build and use tasks and employing separate reward signals for schema, code, and outcome failures, SMITH enables a 4B Qwen3 model to achieve state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on procedural reasoning benchmarks, outperforming larger untrained models and improving performance on downstream tasks when its tools are applied.
By Zhi Rui Tam, Chieh-Yen Lin, Yun-Nung Chen, Shao-Hua Sun, Hung-yi Lee
Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.
ToolCompass is a post‑training framework that improves how large language model agents explore new tools by organizing tool‑call representations according to shared functions. It models each function class as a von Mises–Fisher distribution, reducing variation within a function while increasing separation between different functions, thereby guiding exploration toward functionally similar unseen tools. Experiments on AppWorld and FTRL show consistent gains, with up to a 10.71‑percentage‑point improvement in out‑of‑distribution task success over vanilla post‑training and outperforming competitive baselines.
By Junlin Fang, Chong Zhang, Do Nguyen-Thanh, Xiaogang Xu, Zhen Fang, Sean Du
arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.
By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
Large Language Models: A Plain-Language Overview for Engineers explains that LLMs are neural networks trained on vast text collections to predict subsequent words, and outlines key concepts such as Transformers, pre‑training, fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, retrieval‑augmented generation, chain‑of‑thought prompting, and tool‑using agents. It also discusses efficiency techniques like FlashAttention and QLoRA, provides a life‑cycle figure and comparative tables, and offers a checklist for evaluating LLM claims, including checks for data contamination, model‑based grading, long‑context handling, and hallucination. The article aims to give engineers a clear picture of how training changes and prompts affect generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
By Bahaeddin T\"urko\u{g}lu
ToolSearcher is a reinforcement learning framework designed to improve large‑scale tool selection for large language models. It introduces category‑constrained discrimination, event‑level search modeling, and trajectory‑aligned credit allocation to better distinguish similar tools, optimize multi‑turn search, and provide fine‑grained rewards. Experiments on large‑scale benchmarks show that ToolSearcher outperforms strong baselines in iterative search and complex tool composition scenarios.
By Zhenlong Dai, Xujie Song, Zitong Wang, Tong Niu, Jian liu, Weiqiang Wang, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Chang Yao, Jingyuan Chen
arXiv:2607. 25718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on invoking external tools to complete real-world tasks.
By Xinyi Hong, Pinjun Dong, Xinyang Yu, Binyan Jiang
arXiv:2510. 18383v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application.
By ChangSu Choi, Hoyun Song, Dongyeon Kim, WooHyeon Jung, Minkyung Cho, Sunjin Park, NohHyeob Bae, Seona Yu, KyungTae Lim
arXiv:2608. 20314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mid-training is increasingly recognized as a critical stage for shaping the capabilities of large language models.
By Fengqing Jiang, Yite Wang, Boyi Liu, Zhaoyang Wang, Canwen Xu, Zhewei Yao, Radha Poovendran, Yuxiong He
arXiv:2608. 09934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents improve task performance by decomposing problems into role-specialized behaviors.
By Vitalii Belov, Artyom Sosedka, Andrey Sakhovskiy, Elizaveta Kovtun, Artyom Boyarskikh, Semen Budennyy