D-CORE: Incentivizing Task Decomposition in Large Reasoning Models for Complex Tool Use
About
Effective tool use and reasoning are essential capabilities for large reasoning models~(LRMs) to address complex real-world problems. Through empirical analysis, we identify that current LRMs lack the capability of sub-task decomposition in complex tool use scenarios, leading to Lazy Reasoning. To address this, we propose a two-stage training framework D-CORE~(\underline{\textbf{D}}ecomposing tasks and \underline{\textbf{Co}}mposing \underline{\textbf{Re}}asoning processes) that first incentivize the LRMs' task decomposition reasoning capability via self-distillation, followed by diversity-aware reinforcement learning~(RL) to restore LRMs' reflective reasoning capability. D-CORE achieves robust tool-use improvements across diverse benchmarks and model scales. Experiments on BFCLv3 demonstrate superiority of our method: D-CORE-8B reaches 77.7\% accuracy, surpassing the best-performing 8B model by 5.7\%. Meanwhile, D-CORE-14B establishes a new state-of-the-art at 79.3\%, outperforming 70B models despite being 5$\times$ smaller. The source code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/EfficientAI.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Function Calling | BFCL V3 | Overall Accuracy79.3 | 88 | |
| Tool Use Reasoning | ∞Bench | Avg Accuracy51.3 | 14 | |
| Tool Use | ACEBench-en (out-of-distribution) | Normal Score77.9 | 8 | |
| Tool Use | BFCL Agentic v4 (out-of-distribution) | Web-base Score39 | 8 | |
| Tool Use | τ²-Bench (out-of-distribution) | Retail Score53.5 | 8 |