ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needs
Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly with R1-like models, have demonstrated promising reasoning and generalization abilities. Yet, reward design for tool use presents unique challenges: multiple tools may be invoked with diverse parameters, and coarse-grained reward signals, such as answer matching, fail to offer the finegrained feedback required for effective learning. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study on reward design for tool selection and application tasks within the RL paradigm. We systematically explore a wide range of reward strategies, analyzing their types, scales, granularity, and temporal dynamics. Building on these insights, we propose a principled reward design tailored for tool use tasks and apply it to train LLMs using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Empirical evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach yields robust, scalable, and stable training, achieving a 17% improvement over base models and a 15% gain over SFT models. These results highlight the critical role of thoughtful reward design in enhancing the tool use capabilities and generalization performance of LLMs. All the codes are released to facilitate future research.
Code (1)
Tasks
AllReinforcement Learning (RL)Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ToolRLA: Multiplicative Reward Decomposition for Tool-Integrated Agents
Tool-integrated agents that interleave reasoning with API calls are promising for complex tasks, yet aligning them for high-stakes, domain-specific deployment remains challenging: existing reinforcement learning approach…
Reinforcement LearningWhen Simulation Lies: A Sim-to-Real Benchmark and Domain-Randomized RL Recipe for Tool-Use Agents
Tool-use language agents are evaluated on benchmarks that assume clean inputs, unambiguous tool registries, and reliable APIs. Real deployments violate all these assumptions: user typos propagate into hallucinated tool n…
Reinforcement LearningOpenThinkIMG: Learning to Think with Images via Visual Tool Reinforcement Learning
While humans can flexibly leverage interactive visual cognition for complex problem-solving, enabling Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to learn similarly adaptive behaviors with visual tools remains challenging. A si…
Reinforcement Learning (RL)Visual ReasoningRethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents
Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool c…
Multi-hop Question AnsweringMathematical ReasoningA Composable Specification Language for Reinforcement Learning Tasks
Reinforcement learning is a promising approach for learning control policies for robot tasks. However, specifying complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety constraints) can be challenging, since the user m…
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)