ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution

Shouzheng Huang, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) enhance their problem-solving capability by utilizing external tools. However, in open-world scenarios with massive and evolving tool repositories, existing methods relying on static embedding retrieval or parameter memorization of tools struggle to align user intent with tool semantics or generalize to unseen tools, respectively, leading to suboptimal accuracy of open-world tool retrieval and execution. To address these, we present ToolOmni, a unified agentic framework that enables LLMs for open-world tool use by proactive retrieval and grounded execution within a reasoning loop. First, we construct a cold-start multi-turn interaction dataset to instill foundational agentic capabilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Then, we introduce open-world tool learning based on a Decoupled Multi-Objective GRPO algorithm, which simultaneously optimizes LLMs for both tool retrieval accuracy and execution efficacy in online environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ToolOmni achieves state-of-the-art performance both in retrieval and execution, surpassing strong baselines by a significant margin of +10.8% in end-to-end execution success rate, while exhibiting exceptional robustness and generalization capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1736
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
37421–37439
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1736/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shouzheng Huang, Meishan Zhang, Baotian Hu, and Min Zhang. 2026. ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 37421–37439, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ToolOmni: Enabling Open-World Tool Use via Agentic learning with Proactive Retrieval and Grounded Execution (Huang et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1736.pdf
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