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