Tool use / function calling

StepTool

Superseded baseline#7 of 55 most-superseded

Superseded — cited as a baseline and beaten by newer methods

2 papers critique it · 1 beat it on benchmarks

What papers say

Verbatim critique sentences, each from a paper that cites StepTool as a baseline.

StepTool~yu2024steptool scores each step with GPT-4 during PPO, but the external judge can only score calls that were made, not penalize calls that should not have been, and its knowledge may diverge from the student's.
Knowing When to Ask: Segment-Level Credit Assignment for LLM Tool Use
the acquisition of process rewards heavily relies on GPT-based annotations
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision

Beaten on benchmarks

Head-to-head results where a newer method reports beating StepTool. Values are copied from the source paper's tables — verify against the cited paper.

What to use instead

Recent methods in the same sub-problem, not yet superseded in the knowledge base — arXiv benchmark leaders, not vetted production recommendations.