Large language models increasingly operate as tool-using agents, where small format, argument, or function-call errors can invalidate otherwise plausible responses. We study inference-time feed-forward network (FFN) intervention for improving structured outputs without retraining model weights.
arXiv:2607. 11183v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly operate as tool-using agents, where small format, argument, or function-call errors can invalidate otherwise plausible responses.
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.
arXiv:2607. 12463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents must integrate external tool returns into ongoing reasoning - a capability that standard left-to-right pretraining on code exposes only in its forward direction.
arXiv:2606. 01682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths.
arXiv:2607. 18553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a language model read the quality of ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes?
arXiv:2605. 02906v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the field of software operations, Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted increasing attention.
PROOF-Gen is a method that improves distillation of tool‑calling models by recovering successful trajectories from teacher failures. It uses per‑scenario prompt optimization to generate corrective guidance that steers the teacher to a passing trajectory, then removes this guidance before training so the student learns from clean demonstrations. On τ2‑bench, PROOF-Gen recovers 93% of failed scenarios, boosting Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507’s Pass^1 from 0.132 to 0.529 and improving Gemma 4 E4B‑it by 7.2pp on BFCL v4 multi‑turn, while also raising deployed on‑device model performance by up to 5.0pp across response‑quality metrics.
arXiv:2605. 03195v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern coding agents increasingly delegate specialized subtasks to subagents, which are smaller, focused agentic loops that handle narrow responsibilities like search, debugging or terminal execution.
arXiv:2609.36641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process reward models (PRMs) have become a key component for LLMs, as their step-level feedback supports both post-training and test-time reasoning....
arXiv:2606. 03892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training LLMs to orchestrate multi-step tool calls is held back by three coupled obstacles: realistic stateful execution environments are costly to build, synthetic training queries are often detached from the server's actual state (so the generated tool calls fail to execute), and recall-based RL rewards incentivize verbose tool-calling patterns.
arXiv:2607. 22602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model reasoning, often delivering larger gains on difficult reasoning tasks than parameter scaling alone.
Matryoshka Attribution (MAttr) is a mask‑learning method that identifies nested subsets of a language model’s internal components by minimizing downstream loss. It uses a differentiable sigmoid top‑k operator and randomizes sparsity during training to produce an attribution ordering of components. MAttr tops the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark leaderboard and can be applied via reinforcement learning to pinpoint weight changes that control behaviors such as refusal in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, where restoring just 1% of weights removes refusals while preserving capabilities.