Papers › StepTool: A Step-grained Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool Learning in LLMs

StepTool: A Step-grained Reinforcement Learning Framework for Tool Learning in LLMs

10 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.07745archive 2025-07-28

Yuanqing Yu, Zhefan Wang, Weizhi Ma, Zhicheng Guo, Jingtao Zhan, Shuai Wang, Chuhan Wu, Zhiqiang Guo, Min Zhang

Despite having powerful reasoning and inference capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still need external tools to acquire real-time information retrieval or domain-specific expertise to solve complex tasks, which is referred to as tool learning. Existing tool learning methods primarily rely on tuning with expert trajectories, focusing on token-sequence learning from a linguistic perspective. However, there are several challenges: 1) imitating static trajectories limits their ability to generalize to new tasks. 2) even expert trajectories can be suboptimal, and better solution paths may exist. In this work, we introduce StepTool, a novel step-grained reinforcement learning framework to improve tool learning in LLMs. It consists of two components: Step-grained Reward Shaping, which assigns rewards at each tool interaction based on tool invocation success and its contribution to the task, and Step-grained Optimization, which uses policy gradient methods to optimize the model in a multi-step manner. Experimental results demonstrate that StepTool significantly outperforms existing methods in multi-step, tool-based tasks, providing a robust solution for complex task environments. Codes are available at https://github.com/yuyq18/StepTool.

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