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Tool-Star: Empowering Multi-Tool Collaborative Web Agent via Reinforcement Learning

sigir26-188 · Full research paper · Guanting Dong, Yifei Chen, Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Yutao Zhu, Hangyu Mao, Guorui Zhou, Zhicheng Dou, Ji-Rong Wen
Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks · 50% RL Training of Search Agents · 25% Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestrati · 25%
Abstract

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning (RL). However, enabling LLM-based agents to effectively orchestrate multiple tools remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce Tool-Star, an end-to-end agentic post-training framework that empowers LLM-based web agents to strategically interact with external multi-tool environments. Tool-Star begins with a general tool-integrated data synthesis pipeline that combines two complementary sampling strategies to generate tool-use trajectories, followed by quality normalization and difficulty-aware curriculum construction to filter noisy samples and organize training data from easy to hard. We then introduce a two-stage training paradigm for multi-tool collaborative reasoning: (1) cold-start supervised fine-tuning with tool feedback to bootstrap long-horizon tool-augmented reasoning, and (2) a multi-tool self-critic RL algorithm with hierarchical rewards to reinforce effective tool coordination. Experiments across 13 benchmarks demonstrate Tool-Star's effectiveness. Further analyses provide practical insights for optimizing strategic tool use in web agents. The code is available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/Tool-Star.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Wonduk Seo
66
75 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
64 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
31 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
2 Kaixin Ma
56
75 DSBench: How Far Are Data Science Agents from Becoming Data Science Experts? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
72 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
64 Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games (2023) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
3 Haritz Puerto
50
62 C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
54 MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
49 Fine-Tuning on Diverse Reasoning Chains Drives Within-Inference CoT Refinement in LLMs (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Dacheng Tao 41
Area-chair candidates (5)
Xiaoxi Li 0005 COI: author 4915 papers
Dacheng Tao assigned 415 papers
Hongjin Qian COI: author 3512 papers
Pengyue Jia 3210 papers
Jun Xu 0001 COI: co-author 322 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Wonduk Seo assigned 66 3
75 Automated Visualization Code Synthesis via Multi-path Reasoning and Feedback-Driven Optimizations (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
64 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
2 Kaixin Ma assigned 56 3
75 DSBench: How Far Are Data Science Agents from Becoming Data Science Experts? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
72 Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
3 Haritz Puerto assigned 50 3
62 C-SEO Bench: Does Conversational SEO Work? (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
54 MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
4 Jialong Wu 0007 49 3
72 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
61 WebDancer: Towards Autonomous Information Seeking Agency (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation
6 Farzad Shami 46 3
87 GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
37 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
7 Farima Fatahi Bayat 44 3
75 From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
32 FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation (2025) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
8 Yu Gu 0016 43 3
75 AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
73 Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation
9 Xi Ye 0003 42 3
75 MuSR: Testing the Limits of Chain-of-thought with Multistep Soft Reasoning (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
75 SatLM: Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
11 Ben Liu 0002 41 3
68 SymAgent: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Learning Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
56 MoodAngels: A Retrieval-augmented Multi-agent Framework for Psychiatry Diagnosis (2025) RAG for Domain Applications
12 Archiki Prasad 40 3
75 ReCEval: Evaluating Reasoning Chains via Correctness and Informativeness (2023) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
61 MAgICoRe: Multi-Agent, Iterative, Coarse-to-Fine Refinement for Reasoning (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
13 Keqin Bao 39 3
87 Teaching Language Models to Reason with Tools (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
75 MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
14 Ori Yoran 39 3
87 AssistantBench: Can Web Agents Solve Realistic and Time-Consuming Tasks? (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
41 Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
15 Yong Li 0004 37 3
75 ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
59 PG-Agent: An Agent Powered by Page Graph (2025) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
16 Qisheng Hu 36 3
55 Coordinating Search-Informed Reasoning and Reasoning-Guided Search in Claim Verification (2026) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
35 Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
17 Weiwei Sun 0001 COI: co-author 36 3
75 Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
45 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking
18 Chen Zhao 0013 36 3
73 Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
49 Rethinking Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Evaluating and Advancing Retrievers in Agentic Search Systems (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
19 Wenlin Zhang 0001 36 3
56 Process vs. Outcome Reward: Which is Better for Agentic RAG Reinforcement Learning (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
55 To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
20 Daiting Shi COI: co-author 36 3
60 Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026) RL Training of Search Agents
49 ConsistRM: Improving Generative Reward Models via Consistency-Aware Self-Training (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
21 Qinggang Zhang 35 3
62 LoSemB: Logic-Guided Semantic Bridging for Inductive Tool Retrieval (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
36 Cost-efficient Knowledge-based Question Answering with Large Language Models (2024) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
22 Mariano Barone 35 3
54 SOLVE-Med: Specialized Orchestration for Leading Vertical Experts Across Medical Specialties (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
35 Combating Biomedical Misinformation through Multi-modal Claim Detection and Evidence-based Verification (2025) RAG for Domain Applications
24 Weizhou Shen 35 3
87 Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
64 Mobile-Agent-v2: Mobile Device Operation Assistant with Effective Navigation via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
25 Jiapu Wang 34 3
54 Large Language Models-guided Dynamic Adaptation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024) RL Training of Search Agents
37 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
26 Yingyi Zhang 0001 34 3
62 To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention (2026) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
56 Process vs. Outcome Reward: Which is Better for Agentic RAG Reinforcement Learning (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
27 Armin Toroghi 34 3
37 LLM-based Typed Hyperresolution for Commonsense Reasoning with Knowledge Bases (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
37 Verifiable, Debuggable, and Repairable Commonsense Logical Reasoning via LLM-based Theory Resolution (2024) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
28 Weipeng Chen COI: co-author 34 3
75 Facilitating Multi-turn Function Calling for LLMs via Compositional Instruction Tuning (2025) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
60 ReSearch: Learning to Reason with Search for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025) RL Training of Search Agents
29 Nancy F. Chen 34 3
64 Multi-expert Prompting Improves Reliability, Safety and Usefulness of Large Language Models (2024) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
49 AdaMCoT: Rethinking Cross-Lingual Factual Reasoning Through Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
30 Yongqi Li 0001 34 3
49 Parallel Test-Time Scaling for Latent Reasoning Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
49 TokenSkip: Controllable Chain-of-Thought Compression in LLMs (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
31 Yuanzhao Zhai 34 3
61 Empowering Large Language Model Agent through Step-Level Self-Critique and Self-Training (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
61 Enhancing Decision-Making for LLM Agents via Step-Level Q-Value Models (2025) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
32 Xingyu Tan 0001 33 3
36 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
36 Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
33 Weizhi Xu 0002 33 3
32 Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning for Fact Checking over Texts and Tables (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification
32 Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection With Graph Neural Networks (2024) Automated Fact Checking and Claim Verification