mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Emerging from Ground: Addressing Intent Deviation in Tool-Using Agents via Deriving Real Calls into Virtual Trajectories

arXiv 2601.15120 ↗First posted 21 Jan 2026cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Tool learning and function calling

Abstract (arXiv)

LLMs have advanced tool-using agents for real-world applications, yet they often lead to unexpected behaviors or results. Beyond obvious failures, the subtle issue of "intent deviation" severely hinders reliable evaluation and performance improvement. Existing post-training methods generally leverage either real system samples or virtual data simulated by LLMs. However, the former is costly due to reliance on hand-crafted user requests, while the latter suffers from distribution shift from the real tools in the wild. Additionally, both methods lack negative samples tailored to intent deviation scenarios, hindering effective guidance on preference learning. We introduce RISE, a "Real-to-Virtual" method designed to mitigate intent deviation. Anchoring on verified tool primitives, RISE synthesizes virtual trajectories and generates diverse negative samples through mutation on critical parameters. With synthetic data, RISE fine-tunes backbone LLMs via the two-stage training for intent alignment. Evaluation results demonstrate that data synthesized by RISE achieve promising results in eight metrics covering user requires, execution trajectories and agent responses. Integrating with training, RISE achieves an average 35.28% improvement in Acctask (task completion) and 23.27% in Accintent (intent alignment), outperforming SOTA baselines by 1.20--42.09% and 1.17--54.93% respectively.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 36 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

Builds on

36 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 15

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Butterfly Effects in Toolchains: A Comprehensive Analysis of Failed Parameter Filling in LLM Tool-Agent Systems21 Jul
  2. 2025DICE-BENCH: Evaluating the Tool-Use Capabilities of Large Language Models in Multi-Round, Multi-Party Dialogues28 Jun
  3. 2025PEToolLLM: Towards Personalized Tool Learning in Large Language Models26 Feb
  4. 2025ACEBench: Who Wins the Match Point in Tool Usage?22 Jan
  5. 2024ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Calling2 Sep
  6. 2024WTU-EVAL: A Whether-or-Not Tool Usage Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models2 Jul
  7. 2024EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction11 Jan
  8. 2023MetaTool Benchmark for Large Language Models: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to Use4 Oct
  9. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs31 Jul
  10. 2023ToolQA: A Dataset for LLM Question Answering with External Tools23 Jun
  11. 2023ToolAlpaca: Generalized Tool Learning for Language Models with 3000 Simulated Cases8 Jun
  12. 2023GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction30 May
3 more
  1. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs24 May
  2. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs14 Apr
  3. 2023ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models16 Mar

Other references · 21

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  3. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,402
  4. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
  5. 2023Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Surveycited by 331
  6. 2017Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluationcited by 206
  7. 2025Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challengescited by 205
  8. 2025Evaluation and Benchmarking of LLM Agents: A Surveycited by 152
  9. 2024GTA: A Benchmark for General Tool Agentscited by 77
  10. 2023Tool Documentation Enables Zero-Shot Tool-Usage with Large Language Modelscited by 68
  11. 2024Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models: Integrating Insights from Errors in Inference Treescited by 38
  12. 2024ShortcutsBench: A Large-Scale Real-world Benchmark for API-based Agentscited by 36
9 more
  1. 2025A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrievalcited by 33
  2. 2025A Survey of Vibe Coding with Large Language Modelscited by 27
  3. 2025Reward and Guidance through Rubrics: Promoting Exploration to Improve Multi-Domain Reasoningcited by 21
  4. 2024Can Graph Descriptive Order Affect Solving Graph Problems with LLMs?cited by 16
  5. 2025LLM/Agent-as-Data-Analyst: A Surveycited by 16
  6. 2025a1: Steep Test-time Scaling Law via Environment Augmented Generationcited by 13
  7. 2025DiaTool-DPO: Multi-Turn Direct Preference Optimization for Tool-Augmented Large Language Modelscited by 8
  8. 2025A Large-Scale Evolvable Dataset for Model Context Protocol Ecosystem and Security Analysiscited by 7
  9. 2025Are All Prompt Components Value-Neutral? Understanding the Heterogeneous Adversarial Robustness of Dissected Prompt in Large Language Modelscited by 3

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