Advancing Tool-Augmented Large Language Models: Integrating Insights from Errors in Inference Trees

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage tools, often in the form of APIs, to improve their reasoning capabilities on complex tasks. This enables them to act as intelligent agents interacting with the real world. The recently introduced ToolLLaMA model by Qin et al. [2023] utilizes the depth-first search-based decision tree (DFSDT) mechanism for multi-step reasoning with $16000+$ real-world APIs, effectively enhancing the performance of tool-augmented LLMs compared to traditional chain reasoning mechanisms. However, their approach only employs successful paths from decision trees (also called inference trees) for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), missing out on the potential learning opportunities from failed paths. Inspired by this, we propose an inference trajectory optimization framework based on preference learning to address this limitation.