arXiv AI
Choosing Before Acting: Comparative Value Estimation for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents
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arXiv AI
Jun 2
AgentProcessBench: Diagnosing Step-Level Process Quality in Tool-Using Agents
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 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.
arXiv AI
Sep 3
UniToolCall: Unifying Tool-Use Representation, Data, and Evaluation for LLM Agents
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.
arXiv AI
Jun 2
On Effectiveness and Efficiency of Agentic Tool-calling and RL Training
arXiv:2606. 00135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-calling is a central component of modern large language model (LLM) agents, equipping them with skills beyond their parametric knowledge.
arXiv AI
Jun 30
SCRIBE: Structured Mid-Level Supervision for Tool-Using Language Models
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.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 28
Self-Evolving Agents via Likelihood-Guided Tool-Space Optimization
Self-evolving agents can continually improve their behavior, while tools define the executable action space through which they interact with the environment. However, exposing the full tool library to...