让大模型少调工具却答得更准,提升推理效率
Acting Less is Reasoning More! Teaching Model to Act Efficiently
- 用奖励机制同时优化答题正确性和工具调用次数
- 工具调用减少68.3%,工具产出率提升215.4%
- 适合追求高效推理的AI系统开发者
工具增强型推理(TIR)通过在长文本推理中调用外部工具(如搜索引擎、代码解释器),扩展大语言模型(LLM)的能力。现有强化学习方法多只关注最终答案正确性,忽视工具调用效率,导致过度调用工具,增加计算成本并抑制内部推理能力发展。为此,本文提出最优工具调用控制策略优化(OTC-PO),引入兼顾答案正确性与工具使用行为的联合奖励机制。定义工具生产力为正确答案数与总工具调用次数之比,衡量工具使用效率。在PPO与GRPO框架下分别实现OTC-PPO与OTC-GRPO。在Qwen-2.5和Qwen-Math多个问答基准上测试,结果显示工具调用最多降低68.3%,工具生产力最高提升215.4%,同时保持相近的答案准确率。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) augments large language models (LLMs) with the ability to invoke external tools during long-form reasoning, such as search engines and code interpreters, to solve tasks beyond the capabilities of internal reasoning. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in training such agents, most of existing approaches typically optimize only for final correctness without considering the efficiency or necessity of external tool use. This often leads to excessive tool calling, incurring high computational costs and hindering the development of internal reasoning capabilities - a phenomenon known as \textit{cognitive offloading}. To this end, we propose Optimal Tool Call-controlled Policy Optimization (OTC-PO), a simple yet effective RL-based framework that encourages models to produce accurate answers with minimal tool calls. Our method introduces a tool-integrated reward that jointly considers answer correctness and corresponding tool use behavior of model to reach that answer. To validate the effectiveness, we introduce the metric of \textit{tool productivity}, defined as the ratio between the number of correct answers and the total number of tool calls across all test cases. This metric reflects how efficiently tool usage contributes to successful task completion, with higher values indicating smarter and more autonomous reasoning. We instantiate this framework within both Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group Relative Preference Optimization (GRPO), resulting in OTC-PPO and OTC-GRPO. Experiments with Qwen-2.5 and Qwen-Math across multiple QA benchmarks show that our approach reduces tool calls by up to 68.3\% and improves tool productivity by up to 215.4\%, while maintaining comparable answer accuracy.
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