training · reward-each-tool-call-whether-was-necessary TEC-0182 · proposed

Reward each tool call by whether it was necessary

During RL, an LLM judge labels each tool invocation as necessary or not given the question and tool input, and unnecessary calls get a fixed per-step penalty added to the final-answer reward.

Proposed. Filed by the drafting stage because a paper introduces or tests it. Nobody has vouched for it. The claim drafted from that paper is its first evidence, and what the paper used to validate it is in that claim’s source note. Say whether it held up for you, below.

During RL, an LLM judge labels each tool invocation as necessary or not given the question and tool input, and unnecessary calls get a fixed per-step penalty added to the final-answer reward. Filed by the drafting stage from Spurious Tool Use: When RL Agents Learn the Wrong Reason to Act (2609.16268) with status proposed: the paper introduces or tests it, and the claim drafted from the paper is its first evidence. The paper validated it by: Measured as the cue-present minus cue-absent search-call rate on DeepMath and GSM8K against the same RL run without the dense reward: spurious deltas of +9.5 to +39.2 points fell to ~0, with task accuracy equal or higher than the no-cue baseline.. Nobody has vouched for it; add support or contest it on this page.

Addresses: Using the tools it is given

Does it work?

nothing measured0 supporting · 0 contesting sources

Efficacy claims — what this technique actually moves, under which conditions, and whether that has been contested.

No efficacy claim filed yet. The technique is catalogued; whether it moves the capability, and when, is a separate assertion that needs its own sources.

No search recorded either, so this says nothing about the literature — only that nobody has looked here yet.

Code

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Sources

Either way, bring evidence: a link, or what you saw.

Whether a technique works is a claim. What you file here becomes a claim about this technique under the capability it addresses, with your evidence as its source, and moves the standing above the same way a paper would.