arXiv Machine Learning

Online Reward-Punishment Learning from Fixed-Channel Perceptual Event Streams without Environment Rewards

arXiv:2606. 18963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online reward-punishment learning when the environment provides no scalar reward or evaluative label.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Regime-Conditional Stabilisation of LLM-Augmented Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 04470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a natural interface for translating human objectives into reward signals for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), yet the training-time dynamics of this integration remain poorly understood.

By Faid Keddouri, Sohaib Houhou, Aissa Boulmerka, Nadir Farhi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Guides That Cause Actions: An Offline Study of Guide-Action Mutual Reinforcement in Multimodal Web Agents

The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.

By Chengguang Gan, Yunhao Liang, QingHao Zhang, Shiwen Ni
arXiv AI
Jul 15

In-Context Reinforcement Learning under Non-Stationarity: A Survey

arXiv:2607. 11906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of decision-pretrained transformers, algorithm distillation, long-context meta-RL, and retrieval-augmented agents has renewed interest in in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL): the ability of a pretrained or fine-tuned decision model to infer latent task rules and improve future behavior from interaction context, without test-time parameter updates.

By A Run, Ziluo Ding
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.

By Liming Pu, Xiaoxia Li, Yifu Liu, Teng Cao, Bin Yang