arXiv Machine Learning

ProCredit: From Outcome Rewards to Progress Credit in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

VICT: Verifier-Instrumented Credit Tracing for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces VICT, a method that leverages the internal structure of verifiable tasks to perform fine‑grained credit assignment for long‑horizon LLM agents. VICT exposes executable or evidence‑backed atoms from a task’s terminal verifier and traces them back to actions via dependency‑valid proof edges, redistributing advantage only along these edges. This approach improves performance on ALFWorld and WebShop compared to outcome‑only training and matches recent fine‑grained credit methods without requiring additional critics, labels, or inference‑time verifier access.

By Pengcheng Li, Zhengyang Zhang, Dongxu Zhang, Sui Huang, Shaohua Ma
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv:2607. 13988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn agents solve complex tasks through extended sequences of tool interactions before producing a final answer, making credit assignment a fundamental challenge during post-training.

By Leitian Tao, Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Tao Ge, Hao Cheng, Mike Hang Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Sharon Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Success Leaves Detours: Learning Executable Walkthroughs for Long-Horizon Agents

The paper introduces Trace, a framework that transforms sparse-reward trajectories into executable walkthroughs by identifying progress anchors, propagating credit, and estimating action prerequisites. Trace compiles noisy trajectories into state‑conditioned, verifiable procedures that remove loops and detours, enabling reuse, intermediate‑state resumption, and programmatic verification. Experiments on J‑TTL, WebShop, and ScienceWorld with three open‑source LLMs show that Trace outperforms eight baselines, improving average AUC and Final‑$3$ by 30.0% and 40.5% while using fewer inference tokens.

By Kaijie Chen, Chenyu Fang, Liang Yan, Bo Li, Bo Zhang, Peng Ye
arXiv AI
2d ago

Targeting Pivotal Decisions for Credit Assignment in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2609.36178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a promising approach for training large language model agents. However, its uniform assignment o...

By Dongwon Jung, Hemanth Neelgund Ramesh, Yifan Wang, Xiaomin Li, Yuexing Hao, Yu Hu, Muhao Chen, Varun Chandrasekaran, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, Jaron Lanier
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Agent Reinforcement Learning via Pivotal-Aware Self-Feedback Retry

arXiv:2607. 03702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have shown strong decision-making capabilities in long-horizon interactive tasks, yet they still struggle to effectively leverage failed trajectories: full retries incur high interaction costs, while experience retrieval tends to dilute critical experience signals.

By Weiyang Guo, Zesheng Shi, Longhui Zhang, Zeen Zhu, Min Zhang, Jing Li
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Reconciling Process Supervision with Outcome-Based Credit in Agentic Policy Optimization

The paper introduces TASPO, a method that transforms privileged information (PI) into outcome‑grounded action credit for language‑model agents. TASPO constructs decision‑applicable PI from verified successful experience, aggregates PI‑induced likelihood shifts at the executable‑action level, and converts relative action support into positive, bounded, mean‑preserving weights on the original trajectory advantage. Experiments on three agentic benchmarks show TASPO improves over GRPO by 10.6% and generalizes better to unseen tasks, while reducing supervision mismatch and stabilizing policy optimization.

By Jingxiao Yang, Wangjie Gan, Yingxuan Zhuang, Wenqi Zhang, Jintao Chen, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

AgentOPSD: Recursive Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 05987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks.

By Zi-Han Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Zhiyuan Yao, Jinyang Wu, Jie Wu, Zhengzhou Cai, Yueqing Sun, Ziang Ye, Linji Hao, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Yongliang Shen, Yujiu Yang