TopoCurate:Modeling Interaction Topology for Tool-Use Agent Training

arXiv:2603.01714 · cs.LG, cs.CL · Submitted 2026-03-02 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-03-02

Updated: 2026-10-13

Comments: arxiv version of EMNLP2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Training tool-use agents typically relies on outcome-based filtering: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on successful trajectories and Reinforcement Learning (RL) on pass-rate-selected tasks.

Terminology

Abstract

Training tool-use agents typically relies on outcome-based filtering: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on successful trajectories and Reinforcement Learning (RL) on pass-rate-selected tasks. However, this paradigm ignores interaction dynamics: successful trajectories may lack error recovery or exhibit redundancy, while pass rates fail to distinguish structurally informative tasks from trivial ones. We propose TopoCurate, an interaction-aware framework that projects multi-trial rollouts from the same task into a unified semantic quotient topology. By merging equivalent action-observation states, this projection transforms scattered linear trajectories into a structured manifold that explicitly captures how tool invocations and environmental responses drive the divergence between effective strategies and failure modes. Leveraging this representation, we introduce a dual-selection mechanism: for SFT, we prioritize trajectories demonstrating reflective recovery, semantic efficiency, and strategic diversity to mitigate covariate shift and mode collapse; for RL, we select tasks with high error branch ratios and strategic heterogeneity, maximizing gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio to address vanishing signals in sparse-reward settings. Evaluations on BFCLv3 and Tau2 Bench show that TopoCurate achieves consistent gains of 4.2% (SFT) and 6.9% (RL) over state-of-the-art baselines. We will release the code and data soon for further investigations.

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