arXiv AI

Terminal-RSI: Recursive Self-Improving Terminal Agents via Recursive Self-Rewrite and Policy-Refine

Terminal‑RSI is a new framework for terminal agents that alternates Recursive Self‑Rewrite (RSR) of verified trajectories with Recursive Policy‑Refine (RPR) that inherits a critic. It introduces TB‑GAE for token‑specific baselines, Family Dense Reward (FDR) and Success‑Prioritized Reward (SPR) to calibrate progress, and uses a warm‑up critic, recursive handoff, and stage‑specific learning rates to coordinate the two refinement phases. The five‑stage pipeline applied to Qwen3.8‑27B produces Terminal‑RSI‑27B, achieving 19.84 % on Terminal‑Bench 4.0, 86.52 % on Terminal‑Bench 2.1, 16.95 % on Terminal‑Bench 3.0, and 79.00 % on Terminal‑Bench Hard, while improving process reward and strict completion on LHTB.

arXiv AI
Aug 7

Recursive Synthesis for Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks

arXiv:2608. 05466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality long-horizon training data for terminal agents is expensive to produce, often costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per task, because each task must keep the instruction, environment, reference solution, and verifier mutually consistent.

By Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Ruhan Wang, Anhao Li, Zixun Huang, Junyao Yang, Lei Ke, Ninghao Liu, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Trust the Critic More

The paper introduces Actor‑Critic with Action Chunking (AC2), a method that assigns credit to short action chunks instead of entire trajectories, enabling policy updates without waiting for terminal rewards. AC2 employs local readiness, reference solutions, and 10k‑token chunks to make critic‑based credit assignment reliable. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B with FineProofs‑RL show AC2 surpasses GRPO’s peak validation score while using 2.5× fewer decoding FLOPs and fewer training steps.

By Kaiyue Wen, Luke Bailey, Arvind Mahankali, Tengyu Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 26

CAFE: Self-Improving Search Agents Need Co-Evolving Feedback

CAFE (Coupled Agent–Feedback Evolution) is a framework that lets a shared‑parameter model alternate between acting as a search agent and as a critic that provides corrective feedback. By learning when to request feedback and how to use it, CAFE trains the agent to recover from its own failures and shapes rewards both online and offline. Experiments on seven search benchmarks show that CAFE outperforms other RL‑based agents, maintains gains on out‑of‑domain tests, and reduces hallucinations, indicating that co‑evolving feedback is essential for self‑improving search agents.

By Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Yibo Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbing Liang, Shizheng Zhu, Yuhui Wang, Jingqi Tong, Zhiheng Xi, Jiazheng Zhang, Clive Bai, Clarenceai, Blaze Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

T1: Terminal Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks

The paper introduces T1, a 122‑billion‑parameter Mixture‑of‑Experts model trained with reinforcement learning to perform long‑horizon terminal tasks such as coding and scientific discovery. T1 operates a real shell in a cloud sandbox, making over 300 tool‑call turns per task and receiving rewards from task‑specific verifiers. The authors detail a training recipe that includes aggressive warm‑starting, TITO construction with drift repair, and rollout‑routing replay, achieving significant performance gains on Terminal‑Bench 2.1 and surpassing GPT‑5.4 and GLM‑5.1 on the Long‑Horizon Terminal Bench.

By Junyao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Zongxia Li, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

FlowBalance: Verifier-Grounded Self-Improvement from On-Policy Reasoning Experience

arXiv:2609. 03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A reasoning model can improve from its own on-policy experience, but this inner loop is fragile: terminal verifiers provide reliable yet sparse supervision, while dense same-model guidance can reinforce false confidence or overconcentrate learning on a narrow solution mode.

By Zixun Huang, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
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
Aug 26

Recursive Experiential-Working Memory Evolution for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses

The paper introduces Recuris, a recursive Experiential‑Working Memory architecture that lets long‑horizon agents track task progress and select skills based on current needs rather than full history. By coupling working memory with experiential memory, execution becomes structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components, enabling a bounded recursive memory‑evolution loop. Across four benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of 37 model‑benchmark pairs, raising state‑of‑the‑art performance on tau‑bench and SkillFlow and reducing common long‑horizon failures by up to 80%.

By Zhaochen Yu, Yingcheng Wu, Zhenfei Yin, Kaiyuan Chen, Zhe Zhao, Mengdi Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Ling Yang