arXiv:2608. 04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated.
By Yi Yang, Cong Qin, Xiaodan Liu, Chishui Chen, Qing Dong, Yan Zhang, Cao Liu, Zhao Yang, Lu Pan, Jiaye Lin, Yi Feng
arXiv:2608. 06243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level.
By ZhiYan Hou, Xinyu Tang, Hongyan An, Jianjin Zhang, Weizhen Wang, Yunyun Han, Gengsheng Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Haiyun Guo, Wenbin Hu, Jinqiao Wang, Yafeng Deng
arXiv:2607. 28076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is effective for training large language model agents.
By Binbin Zheng, Zijun Xie, Guanqun Zhao, Enlei Gong, Xing Ma, Xiaoliang Fu, Zeyu Chen
RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation) is a new method that builds a synthetic teacher from a language model’s own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor in parameter or logit space, RISE transforms sparse outcome-based updates into dense token-level targets without external models or privileged conditioning. The approach recursively refines the student model, combining RLVR and on‑policy distillation, and demonstrates superior performance across mathematical reasoning, STEM, code generation, and multi‑turn agentic tasks.
By Yang Li, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty
arXiv:2510.15047v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents often fail to improve in new environments. We identify and characterize a failure mode we call explora...
By Shiqi Chen, Tongyao Zhu, Zian Wang, Jinghan Zhang, Kangrui Wang, Ruochen Zhou, Siyang Gao, Teng Xiao, Yee Whye Teh, Junxian He, Manling Li
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
arXiv:2606. 00305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Distillation (OPD) improves large language model reasoning by training a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy under teacher supervision.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
arXiv:2608. 11967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly rely on long-horizon reasoning to solve complex tasks involving planning, tool use, and memory.
By Zhixin Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Zhibang Yang, Weixuan Xu, Guohong Qiu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
arXiv:2609.36642v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language-model agents are usually trained by reinforcement learning from one reward per episode, and privileged self-distillation enriches it by lettin...
By Muyang Li, Jie Yang, Zhengyu Fang, Junchao Zhu, Zhengkun Xiao, Ruining Deng, Zhe Jiang, Shigang Chen
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv:2607. 05541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning is commonly used to train large language models using environmental feedback.
By Muhammad Zain Amin, Kibele Sebnem Yildirim
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