ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual "Gradients"
arXiv cs.CL / 5/4/2026
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Key Points
- The paper introduces ToolGrad, an agentic framework for generating tool-use datasets that avoids failure-prone, annotation-heavy pipelines used in prior “query-first” approaches.
- Instead of creating a user query and then adding complex tool-use annotations, ToolGrad uses iterative steps guided by textual “gradients” to build valid tool-use chains first (“answer-first”), and then synthesizes the matching user queries.
- ToolGrad produced ToolGrad-500, showing more complex tool usage, lower generation cost, and nearly a 100% pass rate for generated samples.
- Experiments indicate models trained on ToolGrad’s datasets outperform models trained on costly baseline datasets and even some proprietary LLM-based datasets.
- The authors provide the source code, dataset, and models publicly via GitHub for replication and further research.
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