Zhuofeng Zhao

Author directory

2026

Training LLMs for tool use requires more than final-answer supervision: models need trajectories that specify how to decompose a question, call tools across turns, use retrieved evidence, and recover from earlier errors. Existing data construction pipelines often rely on large-scale real-world tool API calls or simple templates, making them costly or limited in interaction coverage. We introduce ToolForge, a virtual-tool data synthesis pipeline for constructing tool-use datasets with three targeted abilities: multi-hop reasoning, multi-turn tool use, and self-reflection. Starting from QA seed data, ToolForge builds an extensible tool space from 19 base virtual tools and automatically generated variants, selects among four tool-use paradigms, simulates both successful and misleading retrieval outcomes, and generates validated tool-use dialogues without large-scale real-world tool API execution. A Multi-Layer Validation module filters invalid traces and is audited with hard negatives mined by Monte Carlo Tree Search. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B on only 4,250 ToolForge samples produces a model named ToolForge-8B, which improves over the Tool-Integrated Reasoning baseline by 21.6% on five out-of-domain QA benchmarks and remains competitive on BFCL and API-Bank. We further quantify the pipeline construction cost, including tool initialization, dialogue generation, validation, and SFT, and compare ToolForge with existing synthetic tool-data sources. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Buycar-arb/ToolForge.