mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

MUA-RL: Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use

arXiv 2508.18669 ↗First posted 26 Aug 2025cs.AIcited by 32

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent rapid advancement of Agentic Intelligence, agentic tool use in LLMs has become increasingly important. During multi-turn interactions between agents and users, the dynamic, uncertain, and stochastic nature of user demands poses significant challenges to the agent's tool invocation capabilities. Agents are no longer expected to simply call tools to deliver a result; rather, they must iteratively refine their understanding of user needs through communication while simultaneously invoking tools to resolve user queries. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for tool use lack the integration of genuinely dynamic users during the RL training process. To bridge this gap, we introduce MUA-RL (Multi-turn User-interacting Agent Reinforcement Learning for agentic tool use), a novel reinforcement learning framework that, for the first time in the field of agentic tool use, integrates LLM-simulated users into the reinforcement learning loop. MUA-RL aims to enable autonomous learning of models to communicate with users efficiently and use various tools to solve practical problems in dynamic multi-turn interactions. Evaluations are done on several multi-turn tool-using benchmarks (see Figure 1). Specifically, MUA-RL-32B achieves 67.3 on TAU2 Retail, 45.4 on TAU2 Airline, 28.3 on TAU2 Telecom, 28.4 on BFCL-V3 Multi Turn, and 82.5 on ACEBench Agent -- outperforming or matching the performance of larger open-source models such as DeepSeek-V3-0324 and Qwen3-235B-A22B in non-thinking settings.

Key facts. Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2025.

Builds on

33 of 45 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Agentic Reasoning and Tool Integration for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning28 Apr
  2. 2025RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning24 Apr
  3. 2025ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needs16 Apr
  4. 2025ReTool: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Tool Use in LLMs15 Apr
  5. 2025ToRL: Scaling Tool-Integrated RL30 Mar

Other references · 28

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  5. 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,885
  6. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  7. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
  8. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,810
  9. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  10. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
  11. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,402
  12. 2022Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Taskscited by 1,076
16 more
  1. 2022STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoningcited by 940
  2. 2023Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Modelcited by 861
  3. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
  4. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Modelcited by 526
  5. 2025GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Modelscited by 467
  6. 2025R1-Searcher: Incentivizing the Search Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 336
  7. 2025WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capabilitycited by 335
  8. 2025Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directionscited by 265
  9. 2025ZeroSearch: Incentivize the Search Capability of LLMs without Searchingcited by 208
  10. 2025Seed1.5-Thinking: Advancing Superb Reasoning Models with Reinforcement Learningcited by 161
  11. 2024StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Modelscited by 132
  12. 2024xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systemscited by 111
  13. 2024AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flowscited by 89
  14. 2025ACEBench: Who Wins the Match Point in Tool Usage?cited by 71
  15. 2024Hammer: Robust Function-Calling for On-Device Language Models via Function Maskingcited by 55
  16. 2025Can a Single Model Master Both Multi-turn Conversations and Tool Use? CoALM: A Unified Conversational Agentic Language Modelcited by 20

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 26.

32 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2025A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Modelscited by 180
  2. 2026EnvScaler: Scaling Tool-Interactive Environments for LLM Agent via Programmatic Synthesiscited by 63
  3. 2025Scaling LLM Multi-turn RL with End-to-end Summarization-based Context Managementcited by 51
  4. 2025UserRL: Training Interactive User-Centric Agent via Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
  5. 2026TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 16
  6. 2026CM2: Reinforcement Learning with Checklist Rewards for Multi-Turn and Multi-Step Agentic Tool Usecited by 14
  7. 2026Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Textcited by 13
  8. 2026InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agentscited by 12
  9. 2025MTIR-SQL: Multi-turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQLcited by 10
  10. 2026TRIP-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents in Real-World Scenarioscited by 10
  11. 2025Klear-AgentForge: Forging Agentic Intelligence through Posttraining Scalingcited by 9
  12. 2026Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learningcited by 9
20 more
  1. 2026LOGIGEN: Logic-Driven Generation of Verifiable Agentic Taskscited by 7
  2. 2025Experience-Evolving Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agent with Hybrid Episodic-Procedural Memorycited by 6
  3. 2026AgentSkiller: Scaling Generalist Agent Intelligence through Semantically Integrated Cross-Domain Data Synthesiscited by 6
  4. 2026When Simulation Lies: A Sim-to-Real Benchmark and Domain-Randomized RL Recipe for Tool-Use Agentscited by 6
  5. 2026One Frozen Simulator Is Not Enough: Simulator Collapse in Multi-Agent RLcited by 6
  6. 2026TopoCurate:Modeling Interaction Topology for Tool-Use Agent Trainingcited by 4
  7. 2026CoVe: Training Interactive Tool-Use Agents via Constraint-Guided Verificationcited by 4
  8. 2026Implicit Turn-Wise Policy Optimization for Proactive User-LLM Interactioncited by 4
  9. 2026FAMA: Failure-Aware Meta-Agentic Framework for Open-Source LLMs in Interactive Tool Use Environmentscited by 4
  10. 2026MUSE: Multi-Domain Chinese User Simulation via Self-Evolving Profiles and Rubric-Guided Alignmentcited by 2
  11. 2026WRIT: Write-Read Intensive Trajectory Synthesis for Multi-Turn User-Facing Agentscited by 2
  12. 2026A First-Principles Derivation of LLM Policy Optimization: From Expected Reward to GRPO and Its Structural Extensionscited by 1
  13. 2026Towards Better Agents for Multi-Turn User Interaction: The Next User Turn Is More Than Contextcited by 1
  14. 2026IAPO: Influence-Aware Policy Optimization for Credit Assignment in Multi-Turn Service Agentscited by 1
  15. 2026UserProxyBench: Evaluating LLM User Simulators for Agent Benchmarks and Trainingcited by 1
  16. 2026CustomerSim: Benchmarking and Aligning Multimodal Language Models as Retail User Simulatorscited by 0
  17. 2026AgentOmnia: Scaling Agentic Models for Full-Scenario Applicationscited by 0
  18. 2026Mint-Agent: Introducing Finance-Native Agentic Foundation Modelscited by 0
  19. 2026ThunderSyncRL: Lossless Acceleration of Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  20. 2026Of Errors and Echoes: Responsibility-Aware Credit Assignment for Tool-Use Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2026On Effectiveness and Efficiency of Agentic Tool-calling and RL Training
  2. 2025AgentGym-RL: Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making through Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2025The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
  4. 2026From Self-Evolving Synthetic Data to Verifiable-Reward RL: Post-Training Multi-turn Interactive Tool-Using Agents
  5. 2025Agent-R1: A Unified and Modular Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
  6. 2026Claw-R1: A Step-Level Data Middleware System for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2026Tool-R0: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Tool-Learning from Zero Data
  8. 2026Pushing Forward Pareto Frontiers of Proactive Agents with Behavioral Agentic Optimization