Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text

Zhihao Xu, Rumei Li, Jiahuan Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Xiting Wang


Abstract
Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions is essential for building capable autonomous agents. However, acquiring diverse and realistic multi-turn tool-use data remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a novel text-based paradigm. We observe that textual corpora naturally contain rich, multi-step problem-solving experiences, which can serve as an untapped, scalable, and authentic data source for multi-turn tool-use tasks. Based on this insight, we introduce GEM, a data synthesis pipeline that enables the generation and extraction of multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora through a four-stage process: relevance filtering, workflow tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. To reduce the computational cost, we further train a specialized Trajectory Synthesizer via supervised fine-tuning. This model distills the complex generation pipeline into an efficient, end-to-end trajectory generator. Experiments demonstrate that our GEM-32B achieve a 14.9% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark. Our models partially surpass the performance of models trained on -bench (Airline and Retail) in-domain data, highlighting the superior generalization capability derived from our text-based synthesis paradigm. Notably, our Trajectory Synthesizer matches the quality of the full pipeline while significantly reducing inference latency and costs.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.452
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:
9961–9980
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.452/
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Cite (ACL):
Zhihao Xu, Rumei Li, Jiahuan Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, and Xiting Wang. 2026. Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 9961–9980, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text (Xu et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.452.pdf
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