mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

EnvFactory: Scaling Tool-Use Agents via Executable Environments Synthesis and Robust RL

arXiv 2605.18703 ↗First posted 18 May 2026cs.CL cs.LGcited by 14

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Equipping LLMs with tool-use capabilities via Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) is bottlenecked by two challenges: the lack of scalable, robust execution environments and the scarcity of realistic training data that captures implicit human reasoning. Existing approaches depend on costly real-world APIs, hallucination-prone LLM simulators, or synthetic environments that are often single-turn or depend on pre-collected documents. Moreover, synthetic trajectories are frequently over-specified, resembling instruction sequences rather than natural human intents, reducing their effectiveness for RL training. We introduce EnvFactory, a fully automated framework that addresses both challenges. EnvFactory autonomously explores and verifies stateful, executable tool environments from authentic resources, and synthesizes natural multi-turn trajectories through topology-aware sampling and calibrated refinement, producing grounded queries with implicit intents. Using only 85 verified environments across 7 domains, EnvFactory generates 2,575 SFT and RL trajectories. Despite using significantly fewer environments than prior work, which are often 5 times more, EnvFactory achieves superior training efficiency and downstream performance, improving Qwen3-series models by up to +15% on BFCLv3, +8.6% on MCP-Atlas, and +6% on conversational benchmarks including τ2-Bench and VitaBench. By fully automating both environment construction and trajectory synthesis, EnvFactory provides a scalable, extensible, and robust foundation for Agentic RL.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Tool learning and function calling, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 40 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 May 2026.

Builds on

40 of 48 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026MCP-Atlas: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tool-Use Competency with Real MCP Servers31 Jan
  2. 2026EnvScaler: Scaling Tool-Interactive Environments for LLM Agent via Programmatic Synthesis9 Jan
  3. 2026From Failure to Mastery: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agents4 Jan
  4. 2025TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use6 Oct
  5. 2025TOUCAN: Synthesizing 1.5M Tool-Agentic Data from Real-World MCP Environments1 Oct
  6. 2025Procedural Environment Generation for Tool-Use Agents21 May
  7. 2025Magnet: Multi-turn Tool-use Data Synthesis and Distillation via Graph Translation10 Mar
  8. 2024ToolFlow: Boosting LLM Tool-Calling Through Natural and Coherent Dialogue Synthesis24 Oct
  9. 2024Tool Learning with Large Language Models: A Survey28 May
  10. 2024StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models12 Mar
  11. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs31 Jul

Other references · 29

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,971
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 8,065
  4. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  5. 2024LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Modelscited by 1,464
  6. 2025Search-R1: Training LLMs to Reason and Leverage Search Engines with Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,444
  7. 2023SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programscited by 1,141
  8. 2024M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillationcited by 1,073
  9. 2025Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?cited by 982
  10. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 815
  11. 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 627
  12. 2025ReTool: Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Tool Use in LLMscited by 392
17 more
  1. 2025The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoningcited by 162
  2. 2026Agent World Model: Infinity Synthetic Environments for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 66
  3. 2025Beyond Pass@1: Self-Play with Variational Problem Synthesis Sustains RLVRcited by 54
  4. 2025Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scalingcited by 54
  5. 2025VitaBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents with Versatile Interactive Tasks in Real-world Applicationscited by 53
  6. 2024Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?cited by 52
  7. 2025TreeRPO: Tree Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 46
  8. 2025Depth-Breadth Synergy in RLVR: Unlocking LLM Reasoning Gains with Adaptive Explorationcited by 43
  9. 2025From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models?cited by 42
  10. 2025One-shot Entropy Minimizationcited by 32
  11. 2025ToolMind Technical Report: A Large-Scale, Reasoning-Enhanced Tool-Use Datasetcited by 30
  12. 2025Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environmentscited by 19
  13. 2025AutoForge: Automated Environment Synthesis for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 17
  14. 2025GTool: Graph Enhanced Tool Planning with Large Language Modelcited by 10
  15. 2025Reasoning through Exploration: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Function Callingcited by 7
  16. 2025Experience-Evolving Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agent with Hybrid Episodic-Procedural Memorycited by 6
  17. 2025Synthesize-on-Graph: Knowledgeable Synthetic Data Generation for Continue Pre-training of Large Language Modelscited by 4

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 14.

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  1. 2025SynthTools: A Framework for Scaling Synthetic Tools for Agent Development
  2. 2026ToolVerse: Unlocking Massive Environments and Long-Horizon Tasks for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2026Teaching LLMs to Learn Tool Trialing and Execution through Environment Interaction
  4. 2025Generalizable End-to-End Tool-Use RL with Synthetic CodeGym
  5. 2026ToolWeave: Structured Synthesis of Complex Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Dialogues
  6. 2026EvoTrainer: Co-Evolving LLM Policies and Training Harnesses for Autonomous Agentic Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2026AgentEscapeBench: Evaluating Out-of-Domain Tool-Grounded Reasoning in LLM Agents
  8. 2025Agentic Reasoning and Tool Integration for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning