ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04086v1
• Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2025 05:04:00 GMT
• Title: ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"
• Authors: Zhongyi Zhou, Kohei Uehara, Haoyu Zhang, Jingtao Zhou, Lin Gu, Ruofei Du, Zheng Xu, Tatsuya Harada,
• Abstract summary: Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like DFS.<n>We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients"<n>This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-5k, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and 100% pass rate.
• Score: 53.7887350405379
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, followed by complex tool-use annotations like DFS. This leads to inevitable annotation failures and low efficiency in data generation. We introduce ToolGrad, an agentic framework that inverts this paradigm. ToolGrad first constructs valid tool-use chains through an iterative process guided by textual "gradients", and then synthesizes corresponding user queries. This "answer-first" approach led to ToolGrad-5k, a dataset generated with more complex tool use, lower cost, and 100% pass rate. Experiments show that models trained on ToolGrad-5k outperform those on expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs, even on OOD benchmarks.

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