Teacher-Guided Tool Learning for Small Language Models via Bidirectional KL Constraints

Abstract

External tools can extend the capabilities of small language models (SLMs), enabling their deployment in resource constrained environments. However, their limited capabilities make it difficult for SLMs to discover effective tool use behaviors through reinforcement learning alone, while direct teacher supervision suffers from teacher student behavioral distribution mismatch and may propagate erroneous preferences. To address these challenges, we propose Selective Teacher guided Policy Optimization (SeTPO), which coordinates student exploration with selective teacher guidance and persistent demonstration supervision. Specifically, SeTPO incorporates reverse KL derived token level teacher feedback into policy advantages on low reward trajectories, while auxiliary forward KL supervision preserves teacher demonstrated behaviors throughout training. Under an idealized bidirectional KL objective, we theoretically establish that the optimal policy achieves expected reward no lower than the teacher's while retaining a guaranteed fraction of the teacher's probability mass. Extensive experiments on BFCL v4 and API Bank demonstrate that SeTPO achieves superior overall performance over supervised fine tuning, reinforcement learning, and distillation baselines across all three student scales.