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Understanding Tool-Integrated Reasoning
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Understanding Tool-Integrated Reasoning
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We study why Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) makes Large Language Models (LLMs) more capable. While LLMs integrated with tools like Python code interpreters show great promise, a principled theory explaining why this paradigm is effective has been missing. This work provides the first formal proof that TIR fundamentally expands an LLM's capabilities. We demonstrate that tools enable a strict expansion of the model's empirical and feasible support, breaking the capability ceiling of pure-text models by unlocking problem-solving strategies that are otherwise impossible or intractably verbose. To guide model behavior without compromising training stability and performance, we also introduce Advantage Shaping Policy Optimization (ASPO), a novel algorithm that directly modifies the advantage function to guide the policy behavior. We conduct comprehensive experiments on challenging mathematical benchmarks, leveraging a Python interpreter as the external tool. Our results show that the TIR model decisively outperforms its pure-text counterpart on the pass@k metric. Crucially, this advantage is not confined to computationally-intensive problems but extends to those requiring significant abstract insight. We further identify the emergent cognitive patterns that illustrate how models learn to think with tools. Finally, we report improved tool usage behavior with early code invocation and much more interactive turns with ASPO. Overall, our work provides the first principled explanation for TIR's success, shifting the focus from the mere fact that tools work to why and how they enable more powerful reasoning.
Forward citations
Cited by 10 Pith papers
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Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling
Plan-RewardBench is a trajectory-level preference benchmark that shows existing reward models, including LLM judges, perform poorly on long-horizon agent trajectories in tool-using scenarios across safety, planning, a...
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Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling
Plan-RewardBench is a trajectory-level preference benchmark that evaluates how well reward models distinguish preferred agent trajectories from hard distractors across safety refusal, tool handling, complex planning, ...
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Agent Explorative Policy Optimization for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning
AXPO addresses the Thinking-Acting Gap in agentic RL training by targeted resampling of tool calls in all-wrong subgroups, delivering +1.8pp gains over GRPO on nine multimodal benchmarks with an 8B model beating a 32B...
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PruneTIR: Inference-Time Tool Call Pruning for Effective yet Efficient Tool-Integrated Reasoning
PruneTIR prunes erroneous tool-call trajectories during LLM inference via three trigger-based components to raise Pass@1 accuracy and efficiency while shortening context.
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TIDE-Bench: Task-Aware and Diagnostic Evaluation of Tool-Integrated Reasoning
TIDE-Bench is a new benchmark for tool-integrated reasoning that combines diverse tasks, multi-aspect metrics covering answer quality, process reliability, efficiency and cost, plus filtered challenging test sets.
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Teaching Thinking Models to Reason with Tools: A Full-Pipeline Recipe for Tool-Integrated Reasoning
A training recipe for tool-integrated reasoning models achieves state-of-the-art open-source results on math benchmarks such as 96.7% and 99.2% on AIME 2025 at 4B and 30B scales by balancing tool-use trajectories and ...
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When to Trust Tools? Adaptive Tool Trust Calibration For Tool-Integrated Math Reasoning
ATTC reduces 'Tool Ignored' errors in tool-integrated reasoning by adaptively trusting tool results according to generated code confidence, yielding 4.1-7.5% gains across models and datasets.
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The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
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E3-TIR: Enhanced Experience Exploitation for Tool-Integrated Reasoning
E3-TIR integrates expert prefixes, guided branches, and self-exploration via mix policy optimization to deliver 6% better tool-use performance with under 10% of the usual synthetic data and 1.46x ROI.
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