Tool-Star: Empowering LLM-Brained Multi-Tool Reasoner via Reinforcement
  Learning
Authors: name: Guanting Dong; name: Yifei Chen; name: Xiaoxi Li; name: Jiajie Jin; name: Hongjin Qian; name: Yutao Zhu; name: Hangyu Mao; name: Guorui Zhou; name: Zhicheng Dou; name: Ji-Rong Wen
Published: 2025-05-22 09:00:19

Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning
capabilities via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL). However, leveraging
the RL algorithm to empower effective multi-tool collaborative reasoning in
LLMs remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce Tool-Star, an
RL-based framework designed to empower LLMs to autonomously invoke multiple
external tools during stepwise reasoning. Tool-Star integrates six types of
tools and incorporates systematic designs in both data synthesis and training.
To address the scarcity of tool-use data, we propose a general tool-integrated
reasoning data synthesis pipeline, which combines tool-integrated prompting
with hint-based sampling to automatically and scalably generate tool-use
trajectories. A subsequent quality normalization and difficulty-aware
classification process filters out low-quality samples and organizes the
dataset from easy to hard. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training
framework to enhance multi-tool collaborative reasoning by: (1) cold-start
fine-tuning, which guides LLMs to explore reasoning patterns via
tool-invocation feedback; and (2) a multi-tool self-critic RL algorithm with
hierarchical reward design, which reinforces reward understanding and promotes
effective tool collaboration. Experimental analyses on over 10 challenging
reasoning benchmarks highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of Tool-Star.
The code is available at https://github.com/dongguanting/Tool-Star.