cs.LGMar 5, 2026

Scaling Agentic Capabilities, Not Context: Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning for Large Toolspaces

Authors: Karan Gupta, Pranav Vajreshwari, Yash Pandya, Raghav Magazine, Akshay Nambi, Ahmed Awadallah

Organizations: Microsoft Research

Abstract

Agentic systems operating over large tool ecosystems must plan and execute long-horizon workflows under weak or non-verifiable supervision. While frontier models mitigate these challenges through scale and large context budgets, small language models (SLMs) remain brittle: eager tool loading saturates context, execution errors compound over time, and sparse rewards limit learning. We introduce ATLAS, a reinforcement finetuning framework that enables SLMs to operate effectively in large-scale toolspace environments by learning how to acquire context and how to execute actions. Our approach makes two key contributions. First, we treat context control and execution structure as learnable decisions, combining iterative tool loading with programmatic tool orchestration to bound context growth and stabilize long-horizon trajectories. Second, we propose rubric-based reinforcement finetuning, which decomposes task success into structured, task-aligned criteria and enables scalable training using small judge models. Across MCP benchmarks, these design choices yield large and consistent gains over generic RL baselines, allowing a 4B SLM to approach frontier-agent performance under far tighter parameter and context budgets.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables4 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Jul 17, 2026

ToolVerse: Unlocking Massive Environments and Long-Horizon Tasks for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

While LLM agents demonstrate strong reasoning abilities in compact and well-defined scenarios, they struggle to maintain robustness and effectiveness when faced with large-scale, diverse, and dynamic real-world environments that demand seamless tool integration. To address this gap, we introduce ToolVerse, a comprehensive framework that scales up agentic RL environments and enables agents to perform complex long-horizon reasoning in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) tasks. First, ToolVerse automatically builds the massive executable agent training environments from nearly 400 real-world Model Context Protocols (MCPs) that contain about 4500 tools. Second, we propose a task design strategy based on a tool dependency graph, utilizing Dynamic Unlocking Sampling Algorithm to generate long-horizon tasks, and produce GUST (Graph Unlocking Sampling Tasks) dataset. Third, to alleviate the credit assigment problem in long-horizon agentic RL, we propose a fine-grained Turn-Aware Relative Advantage algorithm. We conduct extensive Agentic RL training using ToolVerse and evaluate our framework on serveral agentic benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly strengthens LLMs' capabilities in long-horizon tool use, achieving a marked performance boost and showcasing robust reasoning within dynamic environments.
Apr 13, 2026

Escaping the Context Bottleneck: Active Context Curation for LLM Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the "context bottleneck" and the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where accumulated noise from verbose environments degrades reasoning over multi-turn interactions. To address this issue, we introduce a symbiotic framework that decouples context management from task execution. Our architecture pairs a lightweight, specialized policy model, ContextCurator, with a powerful frozen foundation model, TaskExecutor. Trained via reinforcement learning, ContextCurator actively reduces information entropy in the working memory. It aggressively prunes environmental noise while preserving reasoning anchors, that is, sparse data points that are critical for future deductions. On WebArena, our framework improves the success rate of Gemini-3.0-flash from 36.4% to 41.2% while reducing token consumption by 8.8% (from 47.4K to 43.3K). On DeepSearch, it achieves a 57.1% success rate, compared with 53.9%, while reducing token consumption by a factor of 8. Remarkably, a 7B ContextCurator matches the context management performance of GPT-4o, providing a scalable and computationally efficient paradigm for autonomous long-horizon agents.
Mar 9, 2026

In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Tool Use in Large Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities, their performance on complex tasks is often constrained by the limitations of their internal knowledge. A compelling approach to overcome this challenge is to augment these models with external tools -- such as Python interpreters for mathematical computations or search engines for retrieving factual information. However, enabling models to use these tools effectively remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on cold-start pipelines that begin with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), followed by reinforcement learning (RL). These approaches often require substantial amounts of labeled data for SFT, which is expensive to annotate or synthesize. In this work, we propose In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL), an RL-only framework that eliminates the need for SFT by leveraging few-shot prompting during the rollout stage of RL. Specifically, ICRL introduces in-context examples within the rollout prompts to teach the model how to invoke external tools. Furthermore, as training progresses, the number of in-context examples is gradually reduced, eventually reaching a zero-shot setting where the model learns to call tools independently. We conduct extensive experiments across a range of reasoning and tool-use benchmarks. Results show that ICRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness as a scalable, data-efficient alternative to traditional SFT-based pipelines.