English

Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Interactive Multimodal Tool-Use Agents

Computation and Language 2025-09-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Effective interactive tool use requires agents to master Tool Integrated Reasoning (TIR): a complex process involving multi-turn planning and long-context dialogue management. To train agents for this dynamic process, particularly in multi-modal contexts, we introduce a sandbox environment for reinforcement learning (RL) that supports interleaved speech-text rollouts. Our core strategy, Turn-level Adjudicated Reinforcement Learning (TARL), addresses the challenge of credit assignment in long-horizon tasks by employing a Large Language Model (LLM) as a judge to provide turn-level evaluation. To enhance exploration, we integrate a mixed-task training curriculum with mathematical reasoning problems. This unified approach boosts the task pass rate on the text-based τ\tau-bench by over 6% compared to strong RL baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate our framework's suitability for fine-tuning a multi-modal foundation model for agentic tasks. By training a base multi-modal LLM on interleaved speech-text rollouts, we equip it with tool-use abilities, paving the way for more natural, voice-driven interactive agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.14480,
  title  = {Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Interactive Multimodal Tool-Use Agents},
  author = {Weiting Tan and Xinghua Qu and Ming Tu and Meng Ge and Andy T. Liu and Philipp Koehn and Lu Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.14480},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:42:55.580Z