arXiv AI

Towards Improving Sequential Decision-Making in LLM Agents via Experience Memory

arXiv:2608. 03420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have improved substantially on single-shot reasoning tasks, but their performance in sequential decision-making is less well understood.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Clueing up LLMs with Tool-Augmented Deductive Reasoning

The paper introduces a text-based, multi-agent version of the board game Clue to test multi-step deductive reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Six LLM-based agents (GPT‑4o‑mini and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash) play turn‑based games, and a tool‑augmented approach uses a structured possibility matrix to convert implicit game state into explicit remaining possibilities, thereby offloading memory and deductive constraints from the agents. The study compares this tool‑augmented method against a baseline to assess its impact on reasoning quality and task success in a strategic reasoning environment.

By Rebecca Ansell, Autumn Toney-Wails
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Abstraction Agent

The paper introduces the Abstraction Agent, a zero‑shot pipeline that employs a large language model to automatically generate continuous strategic features from a natural‑language game description, score private states, and cluster them into abstraction buckets without any game‑specific evaluators or training data. The pipeline consists of four phases—feature discovery with calibration anchors, batched private‑state scoring, correlation‑based feature selection, and k‑means clustering—and achieves significant reductions in lifted‑strategy exploitability in heads‑up no‑limit Texas hold’em and outperforms scalar rank baselines in ROVER Trials. The method also transfers to other games such as four‑card Pot‑Limit Omaha, HUNL preflop and flop, and Riichi Mahjong, demonstrating that it can uncover strategic concepts that align with recognized game theory insights.

By Boning Li, Longbo Huang
arXiv AI
Jul 29

CAST: Game Solvers as Turn-Level Teachers for LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 25308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) to act in long-horizon games is a promising step toward generalist decision-making, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) relies on sparse final rewards that reveal little about which decisions determine success.

By Yu Wang, Yi-Kai Zhang, Wentao Shi, Ziang Ye, Yuchun Miao, Yueqing Sun, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Lan-Zhe Guo, Han-Jia Ye, Fuli Feng
arXiv AI
6d ago

Self-Play Search Distillation for Large Language Model Reasoning

Self-Play Search Distillation (SPSD) is a framework that generates superhuman synthetic data by having MuZero-like networks play board games in executable environments. The search records are converted into structured reasoning chains that serve as environment‑grounded supervision for training large language models. When applied to Qwen3‑4B‑Base, SPSD improves performance on six mathematics benchmarks from 24.1 to 36.6 and raises the win rate on unseen games from 15% to 45%.

By Lorenzo Molfetta, Wai-Chung Kwan, Giacomo Frisoni, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Jeff Z. Pan, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv AI
Jun 2

MindGames Arena Generalization Track: In2AI Solution with Delayed Per-Step Reward Attribution

arXiv:2606. 00017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training language model agents for multi-agent strategic interaction presents a core difficulty: the quality of any action may depend on future events that never materialize, on moves that violate game rules, or on decisions made by other players.

By Aliaksei Korshuk, Alexander Buyantuev, Ilya Makarov
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

ArenaFlow: From Trajectory Ranking to Hierarchical Credit Propagation for Open-Ended Agent RL

ArenaFlow is a hierarchical credit propagation framework designed to improve reinforcement learning for open-ended agent tasks. It uses tournament-based relative ranking to generate trajectory-level rewards and structured reflective evaluation to identify pivotal success steps, reusable strategy skills, and skill usage attribution. The framework propagates advantages to high-confidence steps and maintains a global skill memory, enabling more targeted optimization and reusable skill priors for future exploration.

By Qiang Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Fanrui Zhang, Xi Chen, Boli Chen, Shihang Wang, Yinfeng Huang, Yi Zheng, Pengjun Xie, Kaipeng Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv AI
Jul 23

In-the-Flow Agentic System Optimization for Effective Planning and Tool Use

arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.

By Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Seungju Han, Sheng Liu, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Pan Lu