arXiv AI

Verifiable Process Rewards for Agentic Reasoning

The paper introduces Verifiable Process Rewards (VPR), a framework that uses symbolic or algorithmic task-solving oracles as action-level verifiers to provide dense rewards for intermediate actions in agentic reasoning tasks. VPR is applied to Sokoban, Sudoku, and Minesweeper, and improves policy performance over outcome-reward baselines. The authors also demonstrate VPR’s effectiveness in a tool‑use benchmark, highlighting its reliance on reliable task oracles and the difficulty of extending it to less structured environments.

arXiv AI
Aug 3

Multimodal Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Verifier for AI Agents

arXiv:2512. 03438v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers.

By Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Hao Cheng, Oier Mees, Theodore Zhao, Andrea Tupini, Isar Meijer, Qianhui Wu, Yuncong Yang, Lars Liden, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Lijuan Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Correct Is Not Enough: Training Reasoning Planners with Executor-Grounded Rewards

arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.

By Tianyang Han, Hengyu Shi, Junjie Hu, Xu Yang, Zhiling Wang, Junhao Su
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
Aug 24

Reinforcing Multi-Turn Reasoning in LLM Agents via Fine-Grained Reward Structure and Credit Assignment

The paper explores how dense, turn-level reward structures can improve reinforcement learning for large language model agents in multi-turn tasks. It introduces three reward granularity types—terminal, delayed, and per-turn—and adapts Group Relative Policy Optimization and Proximal Policy Optimization to each. Experiments on search and game agents show that per-turn rewards consistently yield better training dynamics, faster convergence, and higher answer correctness compared to sparse terminal or delayed rewards.

By Quan Wei, Siliang Zeng, Chenliang Li, Zhongruo Wang, William Brown, Oana Frunza, Wei Deng, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yang Katie Zhao, Alfredo Garcia, Mingyi Hong
arXiv AI
Jul 28

From RLVR to RLSVR: Task Transformation Induces Self-Verifiable Rewards for Open-Ended LLM Self-Improvement

arXiv:2607. 23802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven recent progress in reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) by enabling large-scale optimization.

By Qinsi Wang, Jing Shi, Huazheng Wang, Kun Wan, Yiran Wu, Bo Liu, Qingyun Wu, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen, Handong Zhao, Wentian Zhao