Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
Abstract
While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the prevailing method for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with function calling capabilities, its effectiveness is often compromised by two critical challenges: 1) **Imbalanced Training Signals**, where lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tokens dominate the training signals over concise function calls in the learning objective, and 2) **Imbalanced Data Hardness**, characterized by a scarcity of hard training examples. To overcome these limitations, we propose Balanced Supervised Fine-tuning (**BalanceSFT**), a novel framework that incorporates two key components: a Self-adjusted Signal Balancing (SSB) loss that employs a learnable hyperparameter to dynamically adjust the token contributions of CoT reasoning and function calls, together with a Hard Data Re-sampling (HDR) strategy that establishes a feedback loop to selectively generate new, high-quality complex data guided by model errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed BalanceSFT framework. With BalanceSFT, a 7B model achieves function calling performance that surpasses state-of-the-art models like GPT-5. Our code, models, and dataset are open-sourced.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.900
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 18094–18112
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.900/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, and Ji Zhang. 2026. BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 18094–18112, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness (Hao et al., Findings 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.900.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.findings-acl.900.checklist.pdf

























