Reasoning and Tool-use Compete in Agentic RL:From Quantifying Interference to Disentangled Tuning

TL;DR

This paper investigates the interference between reasoning and tool-use in agentic reinforcement learning, revealing that joint training can hinder performance, and proposes a disentangled tuning method to improve outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces LEAS for quantifying interference and DART for decoupling reasoning and tool-use training, improving agent performance.

Findings

LEAS quantifies interference between reasoning and tool-use.

DART outperforms baseline methods by 6.35% on average.

DART achieves performance comparable to multi-agent systems.

Abstract

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (ARL) focuses on training large language models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with external tool execution to solve complex tasks. Most existing ARL methods train a single shared model parameters to support both reasoning and tool use behaviors, implicitly assuming that joint training leads to improved overall agent performance. Despite its widespread adoption, this assumption has rarely been examined empirically. In this paper, we systematically investigate this assumption by introducing a Linear Effect Attribution System(LEAS), which provides quantitative evidence of interference between reasoning and tool-use behaviors. Through an in-depth analysis, we show that these two capabilities often induce misaligned gradient directions, leading to training interference that undermines the effectiveness of joint optimization and challenges the prevailing ARL paradigm. To address this issue, we propose Disentangled Action Reasoning Tuning(DART), a simple and efficient framework that explicitly decouples parameter updates for reasoning and tool-use via separate low-rank adaptation modules. Experimental results show that DART consistently outperforms baseline methods with averaged 6.35 percent improvements and achieves performance comparable to multi-agent systems that explicitly separate tool-use and reasoning using a single model.