arXiv Computation and Language

FLARE: A Full-Lifecycle Dense Supervision Paradigm for Long-Horizon Coding Agents via Generative Reward Model

FLARE introduces a dense supervision paradigm for long‑horizon coding agents, leveraging a Generative Reward Model (GRM) trained via the RADAR diagnostic framework. The GRM provides real‑time, step‑level risk feedback, enabling FLARE to act as an active scaffold that intercepts high‑risk steps during inference and supplies structured signals for post‑training fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments show FLARE outperforms existing methods, achieving a 5× reduction in token consumption and significant performance gains in both supervised fine‑tuning and RL settings.

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

RubricEM: Meta-RL with Rubric-guided Policy Decomposition beyond Verifiable Rewards

RubricEM is a unified reinforcement learning framework designed for deep research agents that plan, search, evaluate evidence, and synthesize long‑form reports. It introduces rubric‑guided policy decomposition, combining supervised fine‑tuning to scaffold agents with rubrics, stage‑structured GRPO for fine‑grained credit assignment, and a reflection meta‑policy for experience reuse. The resulting RubricEM‑8B model outperforms larger open models on four long‑form research benchmarks and approaches the performance of proprietary deep‑research systems.

By Gaotang Li, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Zifeng Wang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Chun-Liang Li, Long T. Le, Rujun Han, George Lee, Hanghang Tong, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Co-Evolving Acting and Forecasting for Language Agents

The paper introduces CoPE, a method that trains language agents by adding multi‑step action targets to the policy backbone. By supervising each action forecasted from preceding histories, CoPE enables acting and forecasting to co‑evolve without extra inference cost. Across five benchmarks, CoPE outperforms existing RL baselines, achieving up to twice the sample efficiency on ScienceWorld and improving overall performance on realistic applications.

By Haofei Yu, Yixing Chen, Yining Zhao, Xuyan Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Zhigang Hua, Yan Xie, Shuang Yang, Jiaxuan You
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