# ToolComp: A Multi-Tool Reasoning & Process Supervision Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01290 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01290/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)
- [Agent-RLVR: Training Software Engineering Agents via Guidance and Environment Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11425/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19683/) (2025)
- [The Evolution of Tool Use in LLM Agents: From Single-Tool Call to Multi-Tool Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22862/) (2026)
- [TTPA: Token-level Tool-use Preference Alignment Training Framework with Fine-grained Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20016/) (2025)
- [BigFinanceBench: A Workflow-Grounded Benchmark for Financial-Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03829/) (2026)
- [ToolPRM: Fine-Grained Inference Scaling of Structured Outputs for Function Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14703/) (2025)
- [From Static to Dynamic: Adaptive Monte Carlo Search for Mathematical Process Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24351/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite recent advances in AI, the development of systems capable of executing complex, multi-step reasoning tasks involving multiple tools remains a significant challenge. Current benchmarks fall short in capturing the real-world complexity of tool-use reasoning, where verifying the correctness of not only the final answer but also the intermediate steps is important for evaluation, development, and identifying failures during inference time. To bridge this gap, we introduce ToolComp, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate multi-step tool-use reasoning. ToolComp is developed through a collaboration between models and human annotators, featuring human-edited/verified prompts, final answers, and process supervision labels, allowing for the evaluation of both final outcomes and intermediate reasoning. Evaluation across six different model families demonstrates the challenging nature of our dataset, with the majority of models achieving less than 50% accuracy. Additionally, we generate synthetic training data to compare the performance of outcome-supervised reward models (ORMs) with process-supervised reward models (PRMs) to assess their ability to improve complex tool-use reasoning as evaluated by ToolComp. Our results show that PRMs generalize significantly better than ORMs, achieving a 19% and 11% improvement in rank@1 accuracy for ranking base and fine-tuned model trajectories, respectively. These findings highlight the critical role of process supervision in both the evaluation and training of AI models, paving the way for more robust and capable systems in complex, multi-step tool-use tasks.
