Step-wise Policy for Rare-tool Knowledge (SPaRK): Offline RL that Drives Diverse Tool Use in LLMs

Abstract: We present Step-wise Policy for Rare-tool Knowledge (SPaRK), a novel reinforcement learning framework that teaches LLMs to explore diverse tool usage patterns beyond conventional high-temperature sampling. Building on recent advances in step-wise reinforcement learning, we introduce a dual-objective reward system that simultaneously optimizes for answer quality and tool diversity, training a Llama-3.1 8B model through offline PPO on synthetically generated trajectories from the MMLU-Pro dataset. Our approach uniquely employs a rarity-first exploitation strategy where a GPT-4o judge scores candidate actions across eight distinct tools plus chain-of-thought reasoning, with the policy favoring less-frequently used but still viable tools to encourage systematic exploration. Empirical results demonstrate that SPaRK achieves competitive performance across 14 MMLU-Pro categories while exhibiting significantly higher entropy in tool selection compared to both baseline and supervised fine-tuning approaches, suggesting that algorithmic exploration through explicit tool diversity can enhance reasoning capabilities without sacrificing accuracy.