PROOF-Gen: Recovering Golden Trajectories from Failed Tool-Calling Trials
Apple researchers introduce PROOF-Gen, a method that recovers golden trajectories from failed teacher trials in tool-calling distillation. Per-scenario prompt optimization turns near-misses into passing trajectories, recovering 93% of failures on τ2-bench. Fine-tuning with this data boosts Qwen3-4B and Gemma 4 E4B performance, improving deployed model goal completion by up to 6.3pp.
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