ARTIST: RL-Powered Tool Use for LLM Agents Explained (opens in new tab)

Most LLM agents call tools the same way every time: a fixed schema, a static prompt, a hand-crafted decision tree for when to invoke search() vs. calculator(). It works, but it's fragile. The moment a user asks something the template didn't anticipate, the tool-calling pattern breaks. Microsoft Research's ARTIST framework takes a different route. Instead of hard-coding the tool-use policy, it trains a model to discover when and how to call tools through reinforcement learning — with no step-b...