arXiv AI

Predict the Reward, Not the World: World Reward Models for ML Agents

The paper introduces World Reward Models (WRMs), a new approach for machine‑learning agents that selects the best candidate program directly from execution results instead of predicting intermediate outcomes. WRMs, exemplified by the ForeCritic model, are trained on thousands of executed program pairs and achieve a 79.4% success rate in choosing the better program, outperforming general‑purpose LLM judges. When integrated into systems like AIDE, ML‑Master, and ForeAgent, ForeCritic reduces mean task time by 4.4–7.5× while maintaining or improving overall performance.

arXiv AI
5d ago

MLE-World: Predicting Machine Learning Experiment Outcomes with a Learned World Model

MLE-World is a world model fine‑tuned from Qwen3.5‑4B that predicts the terminal output of a machine learning program—such as error traces, training logs, and validation scores—directly from its code and data description, without executing the program. It also provides a confidence score indicating the likelihood that the prediction is correct. Using these predictions, the authors design five test‑time‑scaling policies that compare multiple candidate programs per step, executing only those with low confidence, and demonstrate that MLE‑World matches real outputs on 77.9% of held‑out programs and improves agent performance by up to 22.1% with fewer real executions.

By Brian Ko, Han Wang, Hejia Geng, Li Erran Li, Sherry Yang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

StoreBench: A Live-Commerce Environment for Evaluating and Training Autonomous Operator Agents

StoreBench is a live‑commerce environment where an autonomous agent runs a mid‑size online apparel store on a production‑grade backend, facing continuous customer orders, supplier price changes, and market shocks. The agent uses the same 29 merchant tools as a human operator, with a windowed operation budget that ties simulated time to actions, ensuring that model latency does not affect the simulation. Seven large language models were evaluated across 11 scenarios of 30–45 days and a full simulated year, but none matched the scripted smart‑triage policy, and human experts outperformed all models.

By Daksh Raghuvanshi, Ved Vedere, Yifan Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 16

JevAgentHarness: Benchmarking, Deploying and Training Decision Models That Share Control with LLMs

JevAgentHarness is a new framework that benchmarks, deploys, and trains decision models to share control with large language models (LLMs) in agentic tasks. It introduces AgentDecisionBench to evaluate decision models from isolated questions to full agent control, revealing that accurate isolated decisions still miss many tasks and that naïve delegation can reduce success. By fitting confidence thresholds per choice and training a 4B decision model on states after agent mistakes, JevAgentHarness achieves high task success while cutting cost and speeding up execution, with results and resources made publicly available.

By Kunlun Zhu, Tao Feng, Xu Han, Heng Wang, Ling Yang, Xiangru Tang, Jiaxuan You, Heng Ji
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

CausalDreamer: Learning Predictive World Models with Latent Disentanglement

CausalDreamer enhances generative world models by freezing the original video tokenizer and re-encoding its latent space into a factored representation that separates controllable versus uncontrollable dynamics and reward-relevant versus reward-irrelevant information. The pretrained dynamics model is fine‑tuned to predict this factored representation, enabling more accurate model‑predictive planning. On the MMBench2 benchmark, CausalDreamer improves normalized scores by 14% on clean tasks and 25% on manipulated variants compared to the baseline, while both models perform poorly on entirely new environments.

By Prince Jha, Nils Lukas, Kun Zhang, Salem Lahlou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Designing Reward Signals for Portable Query Generation: A Case Study in Industrial Semantic Job Search

arXiv:2606. 27291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Job-search platforms rely on low-bandwidth query interfaces that often fail to capture the high-dimensional complexity of candidate profiles.

By Ping Liu, Qianqi Shen, Jianqiang Shen, Wenqiong Liu, Rajat Arora, Yunxiang Ren, Chunnan Yao, Dan Xu, Baofen Zheng, Wanjun Jiang, Andrii Soviak, Kevin Kao, Jingwei Wu, Wenjing Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling

AgentRM proposes a generalizable reward model to guide LLM-based agents during test-time search, outperforming direct policy fine-tuning. Three reward modeling strategies—explicit, implicit, and LLM-as-a-judge—are explored, and AgentRM improves base policy performance by an average of 8.8 points across nine tasks, surpassing top general agents by 4.0 points. It also shows strong weak-to-strong generalization and can boost specialized agents, with plans to release code for further research.

By Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun