arXiv:2603. 17216v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the advent of AI agents, automated scientific discovery is becoming an increasingly plausible goal.
UniToolCall introduces a unified framework for tool-use in large language model agents, standardizing toolset construction, dataset generation, and evaluation. The framework aggregates over 22,000 tools and creates a hybrid training corpus of more than 390,000 instances by combining ten public datasets with synthetically generated, structurally controlled trajectories. It models diverse interaction patterns—single‑hop vs. multi‑hop, single‑turn vs. multi‑turn, serial vs. parallel execution—and adds an Anchor Linkage mechanism to enforce cross‑turn dependencies, while converting seven public benchmarks into a common Query–Action–Observation–Answer format for fine‑grained evaluation.
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.
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.
arXiv:2603. 14465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into tool-using agents, they remain brittle in long-horizon interactions.
arXiv:2607. 29626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs evolve from code completion systems into autonomous scientific agents, evaluating their ability to conduct experiments has become increasingly important.
arXiv:2606. 03762v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) equips large language models (LLMs) with tool-use capabilities that substantially improve reasoning on complex tasks.
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:2606. 18284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The limiting resource for training agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly frontier task supply: valid, solvable tasks just difficult enough to train the current model.
ToolRobustBench is a stage-wise diagnostic benchmark designed to evaluate and diagnose failures in tool‑calling agents, which are large language models that select tools, provide structured arguments, and interpret tool feedback. The benchmark aligns four perturbation families—tool‑interface, user‑intent, tool‑output/observation, and runtime‑environment—with the tool‑use pipeline, attributing failures to specific stages such as tool selection, schema grounding, argument binding, and feedback handling. Experiments across 15,456 instances, 7 models, and 16 local tools reveal that while overall performance is high, robustness degrades significantly, especially under tool‑output/observation perturbations, and mixed‑family perturbations produce non‑additive failure patterns.
MM-VeriAgent is a reinforcement‑learning framework that learns to verify multimodal misinformation by leveraging a specialized toolkit called MM-VeriTools. The toolkit encapsulates the strongest models for textual, visual, and cross‑modal forgery analysis as callable tools with a unified interface. To improve training efficiency, the authors introduce a Tool‑Execution Cache that pre‑executes candidate tool calls and reuses cached outputs, resulting in substantial accuracy gains on MMFakeBench and reduced online tool executions during training.
arXiv:2601. 03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning.