Existing synthetic tool-use corpora are primarily designed for offline supervised fine-tuning, yet reinforcement learning (RL) requires executable environments that support reward-checkable online rollouts. We propose COVERT, a two-stage pipeline that first generates reliable base tool-use trajectories through self-evolving synthesis with multi-level validation, and then applies oracle-preserving augmentations that systematically increase environmental complexity. These augmentations introduce distractor tools, indirect or ambiguous user queries, and noisy, multi-format, or erroneous tool outputs, while strictly preserving oracle tool calls and final answers as ground truth. This design enables automatic reward computation via reference matching for standard cases and lightweight judge-assisted verification for special behaviors such as error detection, supporting RL optimization of tool-calling policies. On Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B, COVERT-RL improves overall accuracy on BFCL v3 from 56.5 to 59.9 and on ACEBench from 53.0 to 59.3, with minimal regressions on general-ability benchmarks; when stacked on SFT, it further reaches 62.1 and 61.8, confirming additive gains. These results suggest that oracle-preserving synthetic environments offer a practical RL refinement stage, complementary to SFT, for improving tool-use robustness under ambiguity and unreliable tool feedback.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed COVERT pipeline. Stage 1 generates reliable base tool-use trajectories with simple queries and single tools via self-evolution and validation. Stage 2 applies oracle-preserving augmentations to produce complex multi-tool scenarios with noisy and multi-format outputs, while preserving oracle tool behaviors for reward computation during RL training.
Figure 2: Reliable tool-use trajectory generation pipeline (Stage I) with diverse prompt construction, LLM-based generation, multi-level trajectory checking, and self-evolving seed pool expansion.
Figure 3: Illustration of oracle-preserving augmentation. Starting from a simple and reliable base tool-calling trajectory (left), we apply controlled perturbations to the user query and tool environment (right), including indirect entity references, distractor tools, and injected tool-call failures.
Capability
Modified
Oracle preserved
Knobs
Verifier
Distractor tools
T
c∗,a∗
#distractors, overlap
Exact
Query rewriting
u
c∗,a∗
indirection level
Exact
Multi-fmt parsing
o∗ format
c∗,a∗
format family
Exact
Noisy outputs
o∗ content
c∗,a∗
noise length
Exact
Erroneous outputs
o∗
c∗ , label k
error mode
Judge
Problematic queries
u
c∗ , label k
failure type
Judge
Table 1: Augmentation families in Stage II. “Modified”: perturbed component; “Oracle preserved”: fields for reward verification; “Knobs”: controllable parameters; “Verifier”: exact or judge-assisted.
Overall
Non-Live AST
Live
Multi Turn
Relevance Detection
Irrelevance Detection
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
54.1
84.2
72.2
10.0
72.2
67.9
with TOUCAN-SFT
57.0
78.5
75.0
15.6
66.7
75.1
with COVERT-RL (ours)
57.2
85.8
76.4
8.8
72.2
80.1
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
56.5
83.5
73.6
15.6
83.3
69.3
with TOUCAN-SFT
59.5
85.3
76.4
18.3
66.7
76.3
with COVERT-RL (ours)
59.9
86.8
78.1
14.9
72.2
81.2
Table 2: BFCL v3 accuracy based on Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B/14B, with TOUCAN-SFT or COVERT-RL. All numbers are accuracies (%). Bold for the best performance.
Overall Acc
Atom
Normal
Special
Agent
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
42.6
60.0
52.6
36.5
10.2
with TOUCAN-SFT
41.8
61.7
53.2
26.7
17.5
with COVERT-RL (ours)
51.2
73.3
59.8
50.7
9.2
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
53.0
61.3
55.0
68.6
14.0
with TOUCAN-SFT
48.8
76.1
61.9
27.3
24.0
with COVERT-RL (ours)
59.3
76.3
66.5
70.4
13.0
Table 3: ACEBench accuracy on Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B/14B. All numbers are accuracies (%).
LiveCodeBench -v5
AIME 2024
AIME 2025
Math 500
IFEval
GPQA- Diamond
MMLU -Pro
GSM8K
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
26.1
13.3
6.7
76.6
57.7
33.8
43.1
80.7
with TOUCAN-SFT
27.3
10.0
6.7
72.6
53.1
25.8
38.3
76.0
with COVERT-RL (ours)
25.8
13.3
6.7
76.4
58.4
35.4
43.1
80.8
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
36.8
20.0
13.3
80.6
62.3
44.4
48.7
82.3
with TOUCAN-SFT
35.8
10.0
6.7
79.4
55.1
38.4
42.0
80.2
with COVERT-RL (ours)
35.9
20.0
13.3
80.4
63.0
43.4
48.2
82.4
Table 4: Performance on general-ability benchmarks: LiveCodeBench-v5, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, Math500, IFEval (Prompt-Strict), GPQA-Diamond, MMLU-Pro, and GSM8K.
BFCL v3
ACEBench
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
54.1
42.6
with COVERT-RL (ours)
57.2
51.2
with TOUCAN-SFT
57.0
41.8
with TOUCAN-SFT + COVERT-RL (ours)
59.1
53.9
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
56.5
53.0
with COVERT-RL (ours)
59.9
59.3
Table 5: Summary of overall accuracy on BFCL v3 and ACEBench for all Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B/14B variants.
Appendix figures & tables10 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 4: System prompt used for evaluation.
Rollout-time reward
Perturbation control
Oracle- preserving
APIGen
×
×
×
ToolACE
×
×
×
TOUCAN
×
×
×
ToolRL
✓
×
×
ToolZero
✓
×
×
COVERT
✓
✓
✓
Appendix
Table 6: Positioning of COVERT relative to representative prior work along three design axes.
Overall
Non-Live AST
Live
Multi Turn
Relevance Detection
Irrelevance Detection
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
54.1
84.2
72.2
10.0
72.2
67.9
with COVERT-RL (ours)
57.2
85.8
76.4
8.8
72.2
80.1
with TOUCAN-SFT
57.0
78.5
75.0
15.6
66.7
75.1
with TOUCAN-SFT + COVERT-RL (ours)
59.1
84.2
76.5
15.0
72.2
81.6
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
56.5
83.5
73.6
15.6
83.3
69.3
with COVERT-RL (ours)
59.9
86.8
78.1
14.9
72.2
81.2
Appendix
Table 7: Full BFCL v3 accuracy for all Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B/14B variants (extends Table 5 ). All numbers are accuracies (%).
Overall Acc
Atom
Normal
Special
Agent
Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B
42.6
60.0
52.6
36.5
10.2
with COVERT-RL (ours)
51.2
73.3
59.8
50.7
9.2
with TOUCAN-SFT
41.8
61.7
53.2
26.7
17.5
with TOUCAN-SFT + COVERT-RL (ours)
53.9
78.7
62.6
49.3
17.0
Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B
53.0
61.3
55.0
68.6
14.0
with COVERT-RL (ours)
59.3
76.3
66.5
70.4
13.0
Appendix
Table 8: Full ACEBench accuracy for all Qwen2.5-Instruct-7B/14B variants (extends Table 5 ). All numbers are accuracies (%).
Figure 5: Training reward curves for COVERT-RL initialized from Qwen2.5-Instruct (blue) and from TOUCAN-SFT (orange), at 7B (left) and 14B (right) scales.
Figure 6: Examples 1: Raw tool-calling data examples of layered symbolic reasoning.
Figure 7: Examples 2: Raw tool-calling data example of parallel tool calling.
Figure 8: Examples 3: Raw tool-calling data example of multi-turn tool calling.
Figure 9: Raw case-study conversations (Case 1) comparing base vs. COVERT-RL models.
Figure 10: Raw case-study conversations (Case 2) comparing base vs. COVERT-RL models.
Equipping LLMs with tool-use capabilities via Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) is bottlenecked by two challenges: the lack of scalable, robust execution environments and the scarcity of realistic training data that captures implicit human reasoning. Existing approaches depend on costly real-world APIs, hallucination-prone LLM simulators, or synthetic environments that are often single-turn or depend on pre-collected documents. Moreover, synthetic trajectories are frequently over-specified, resembling instruction sequences rather than natural human intents, reducing their effectiveness for RL training. We introduce EnvFactory, a fully automated framework that addresses both challenges. EnvFactory autonomously explores and verifies stateful, executable tool environments from authentic resources, and synthesizes natural multi-turn trajectories through topology-aware sampling and calibrated refinement, producing grounded queries with implicit intents. Using only 85 verified environments across 7 domains, EnvFactory generates 2,575 SFT and RL trajectories. Despite using significantly fewer environments than prior work, which are often 5 times more, EnvFactory achieves superior training efficiency and downstream performance, improving Qwen3-series models by up to +15% on BFCLv3, +8.6% on MCP-Atlas, and +6% on conversational benchmarks including τ2-Bench and VitaBench. By fully automating both environment construction and trajectory synthesis, EnvFactory provides a scalable, extensible, and robust foundation for Agentic RL.
Minrui Xu, Zilin Wang, Mengyi DENG +12
LARK, HKUST (GZ) · University of Cambridge · UCL +2
High-quality tool-use data is critical for training language models to interact effectively with external tools. However, existing synthetic approaches typically follow a generate-then-filter paradigm with static post-hoc verification, often yielding inefficient data with imbalanced feature distributions. We propose ToolLoop, a closed-loop framework that decomposes synthesis into three progressive stages: (1) sampling function name combinations as ground truth; (2) backward derivation of user queries; and (3) forward derivation of tool calls. At each stage, dynamic self-feedback iteratively guides the model toward high-quality generation, realizing a transition from generate-then-filter to generate-verify-refine. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL), a 4B parameter model trained with our 11K synthetic examples achieves 86.40% accuracy in non-reasoning mode, while an Isolate variant that removes BFCL-overlapping candidate functions still reaches 86.07%. Cross-benchmark evaluation on ACEBench further demonstrates strong generalization, with 72.1% overall accuracy using only 18.3% of baseline training data.
Developing multi-turn interactive tool-use agents is challenging because real-world user needs are often complex and ambiguous, yet agents must execute deterministic actions to satisfy them. To address this gap, we introduce CoVe (Constraint-Verification), a post-training data synthesis framework designed for training interactive tool-use agents while ensuring both data complexity and correctness. CoVe begins by defining explicit task constraints, which serve a dual role: they guide the generation of complex trajectories and act as deterministic verifiers for assessing trajectory quality. This enables the creation of high-quality training trajectories for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and the derivation of accurate reward signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Our evaluation on the challenging τ2-bench benchmark demonstrates the effectiveness of the framework. Notably, our compact CoVe-4B model achieves success rates of 43.0% and 59.4% in the Airline and Retail domains, respectively; its overall performance significantly outperforms strong baselines of similar scale and remains competitive with models up to 17× its size. These results indicate that CoVe provides an effective and efficient pathway for synthesizing training data for state-of-the-art interactive tool-use agents. To support future research, we open-source our code, trained model, and the full set of 12K high-quality trajectories used for training.