English

SynthTools: A Framework for Scaling Synthetic Tools for Agent Development

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-28 v2 Machine Learning Software Engineering

Abstract

For agentic systems to use external tools to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, we need a large set of diverse and controllable tool-use environments. We introduce SynthTools, a fully LLM-based pipeline spanning the entire lifecycle: environment generation, simulation, validation and task construction. By operating end-to-end through LLMs, our framework complements other tool-use environments bottlenecked by the complexity of real APIs, and ensures scalability and controllability by design. The framework consists of three components: top-down environment generation, which hierarchically constructs diverse, domain-grounded tool environments; environment simulation and validation, which ensures tools can be reliably emulated and filters out those that cannot; and bottom-up task and trajectory generation, which produces solvable and verifiable tasks together with multi-step trajectories, exposing control over difficulty, length, trajectory composition, and domain focus to guarantee flexibility. As a concrete instantiation, we release the dataset comprising 73,88373{,}883 validated tools across 6,8006{,}800 environments and 100100 fields, 79,92579{,}925 verifiable tasks as well as the pipeline to generate trajectories at scale. Training Qwen3 models of various sizes on a corpus of trajectories generated from these tasks yields gains across multiple tool-use benchmarks, including real APIs, indicating tool-use capabilities trained on synthetic data may transfer to some real environments. Together, these results suggest that SynthTools can serve as a useful infrastructure for large-scale training of tool-use agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.09572,
  title  = {SynthTools: A Framework for Scaling Synthetic Tools for Agent Development},
  author = {Tommaso Castellani and Naimeng Ye and Daksh Mittal and Thomson Yen and Emmanouil Koukoumidis and William Zeng and Hongseok Namkoong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.09572},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:34:23.527Z