SAP: State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance for Multi-Turn Tool Use

Zichen Tian, Jinpeng Chen, Cheng Gong, Suiyun Zhang, Rui Liu


Abstract
High-quality multi-turn tool-use data is essential for training agentic models, yet existing data synthesis methods often underrepresent the argument-level dependencies that are critical to long-horizon tool use. As a result, even when a model selects the correct tool, task execution may still fail because the model fills tool arguments with fabricated, stale, or weakly grounded values. To address this problem, we propose **State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance (SAP)**. SAP combines state guidance, tool-argument provenance constraints, and turn-level validation to efficiently construct tool-use trajectories with long-range dependencies and high accuracy. Using data generated by SAP, we build SAP-4B, which is highly competitive even when compared with much larger models across multiple benchmarks. Source code, synthesized data, and trained weights are available at https://github.com/Zichen1024/SAP.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1013
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21400–21422
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1013/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zichen Tian, Jinpeng Chen, Cheng Gong, Suiyun Zhang, and Rui Liu. 2026. SAP: State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance for Multi-Turn Tool Use. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 21400–21422, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SAP: State-Guided Data Synthesis with Argument Provenance for Multi-Turn Tool Use (Tian et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1013.pdf