arXiv AI
Oct 16

Priming Base Models for Agentic Post-Training: An Open Midtraining Recipe

The paper introduces an open midtraining recipe that primes base models for agentic post‑training, filling a gap between pretraining and full fine‑tuning. It trains on 256K context with hundreds of billions of tokens drawn from natural software‑engineering data and a small share of agentic traces. Applying this midtraining to Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and Super models yields measurable gains on SWE‑bench and DeepSWE benchmarks after identical full SFT, and improves robustness across agent harnesses.

By Soumye Singhal, Joseph Jennings, Ka Shun Shum, Alexander Bukharin, Khushi Bhardwaj, Zirui Liu, Venkat Srinivasan, Jonathan Li, Yash Jain, Kezhi Kong, Markus Kliegl, Olivier Delalleau, Sanjeev Satheesh, Mostofa Patwary
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents

The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.

By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
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.

By Yijuan Liang, Xinghao Chen, Yifan Ge, Ziyi Wu, Hao Wu, Changyu Zeng, Wei Xing, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Toolcompass: Guiding Tool Trialing, Not Suppressing It

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