{"ID":2828941,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13278","arxiv_id":"2512.13278","title":"AutoTool: Dynamic Tool Selection and Integration for Agentic Reasoning","abstract":"Agentic reinforcement learning has advanced large language models (LLMs) to reason through long chain-of-thought trajectories while interleaving external tool use. Existing approaches assume a fixed inventory of tools, limiting LLM agents' adaptability to new or evolving toolsets. We present AutoTool, a framework that equips LLM agents with dynamic tool-selection capabilities throughout their reasoning trajectories. We first construct a 200k dataset with explicit tool-selection rationales across 1,000+ tools and 100+ tasks spanning mathematics, science, code generation, and multimodal reasoning. Building on this data foundation, AutoTool employs a dual-phase optimization pipeline: (i) supervised and RL-based trajectory stabilization for coherent reasoning, and (ii) KL-regularized Plackett-Luce ranking to refine consistent multi-step tool selection. Across ten diverse benchmarks, we train two base models, Qwen3-8B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with AutoTool. With fewer parameters, AutoTool consistently outperforms advanced LLM agents and tool-integration methods, yielding average gains of 6.4% in math \u0026 science reasoning, 4.5% in search-based QA, 7.7% in code generation, and 6.9% in multimodal understanding. In addition, AutoTool exhibits stronger generalization by dynamically leveraging unseen tools from evolving toolsets during inference.","short_abstract":"Agentic reinforcement learning has advanced large language models (LLMs) to reason through long chain-of-thought trajectories while interleaving external tool use. Existing approaches assume a fixed inventory of tools, limiting LLM agents' adaptability to new or evolving toolsets. We present AutoTool, a framework that...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13278","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13278v1","authors":"[\"Jiaru Zou\",\"Ling Yang\",\"Yunzhe Qi\",\"Sirui Chen\",\"Mengting Ai\",\"Ke Shen\",\"Jingrui He\",\"Mengdi Wang\"]","published":"2025-12-15T12:38:04Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\",\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}