Procedure-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models

Published in Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026), 2026

Recommended citation: Qinglong Zheng, Jiajun Fan, Chaoran Cheng, Ge Liu. "Procedure-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models." COLM 2026.

A procedure-aware RL framework for tool-augmented LLMs that supervises the procedural fidelity of multi-turn tool invocations, not just final-answer correctness. It scores both invocation-chain quality and final system-state correctness, and trains with GRPO plus KL regularization. On API-Bank, Bamboogle and BFCL-V3, a fine-tuned Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct consistently beats correctness-only baselines and reaches average accuracy competitive with far larger proprietary models. Optimizing tool sequencing also improves recovery from failed tool calls.