Democratizing Tool Learning with Environments Fully Simulated by a Free 8B Language Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tang, Chenming, Huang, Hsiu-Yuan, Liu, Weijie, Zheng, Junqiang, Yang, Saiyong, Wu, Yunfang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866910197443723264
author Tang, Chenming
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Liu, Weijie
Zheng, Junqiang
Yang, Saiyong
Wu, Yunfang
author_facet Tang, Chenming
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Liu, Weijie
Zheng, Junqiang
Yang, Saiyong
Wu, Yunfang
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevalent paradigm for training tool calling agents, which typically requires online interactive environments. Existing approaches either rely on training data with ground truth annotations or require advanced proprietary language models (LMs) to synthesize environments that keep fixed once created. In this work, we propose TRUSTEE, a cost-friendly method for training tool calling agents with dynamic environments fully simulated by free open-source LMs that can be as small as 8B, including task generation, user simulation, tool simulation and trajectory evaluation, paired with an adaptive curriculum learning mechanism that controls task difficulty during training. Our empirical results show that TRUSTEE outperforms baselines which require extra external resources in most cases. These confirm that, with a sufficiently sophisticated design, even simulated environments with a local 8B LM as the backbone could set a strong baseline for tool learning. We hope our proposed paradigm could democratize tool learning and inspire future research on environment scaling with limited resources.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_17739
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Democratizing Tool Learning with Environments Fully Simulated by a Free 8B Language Model
Tang, Chenming
Huang, Hsiu-Yuan
Liu, Weijie
Zheng, Junqiang
Yang, Saiyong
Wu, Yunfang
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a prevalent paradigm for training tool calling agents, which typically requires online interactive environments. Existing approaches either rely on training data with ground truth annotations or require advanced proprietary language models (LMs) to synthesize environments that keep fixed once created. In this work, we propose TRUSTEE, a cost-friendly method for training tool calling agents with dynamic environments fully simulated by free open-source LMs that can be as small as 8B, including task generation, user simulation, tool simulation and trajectory evaluation, paired with an adaptive curriculum learning mechanism that controls task difficulty during training. Our empirical results show that TRUSTEE outperforms baselines which require extra external resources in most cases. These confirm that, with a sufficiently sophisticated design, even simulated environments with a local 8B LM as the backbone could set a strong baseline for tool learning. We hope our proposed paradigm could democratize tool learning and inspire future research on environment scaling with limited resources.
title Democratizing Tool Learning with Environments Fully Simulated by a Free 8B Language Model
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17739