arXiv Machine Learning

Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606. 26080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process reward models enable fine-grained, step-level evaluation of LLMs, yet building them for agentic settings remains prohibitively difficult: long-horizon interactions, irreversible actions, and stochastic environment feedback make both human annotation and Monte Carlo estimation infeasible at scale.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

arXiv:2608.30528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-tra...

By Yuanqiang Yu, Yanzhao Zheng, Zhentao Zhang, Tianze Xu, Chao Ma, Jihuai Zhu, Jiashun Liu, Xinle Deng, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks

arXiv:2604.00055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing robotic foundation policies are trained primarily via large-scale imitation learning. While such models demonstrate strong capabilit...

By Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi, Xiaojie Wang, Evan Sheehan, Anurag Shivaprasad, Yaqi Xie, Katia Sycara, Yesh Dattatreya
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Beyond Solvability: Task Learnability as a Static Prior for LLM RL Post-Training

arXiv:2608. 09217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training paradigm for eliciting reasoning capabilities in large language models, yet uniform task sampling allocates compute without regard to differences in how tasks respond to optimization.

By Ting Zhou, Zhenqing Ling, Daoyuan Chen, Qianli Shen, Yilun Huang, Ying Shen, Yaliang Li
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Back to the Definition: Estimating Step-Level Advantages via Trajectory Graphs for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces GRAFT, a Graph-based Faithful sTep-level credit-assignment framework that constructs a trajectory graph from rollout trajectories, recovers node state-values via Bellman iteration, and assigns step-level advantages based on node value differences. It also proposes Graph GAE to further reduce state-value estimation bias. Experiments on multi-turn agentic benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over GRPO and other recent agentic RL algorithms.

By Xincheng Yao, Haobo Fu, Weiming Liu, Chongyang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

On Advantage Estimates for Max@K Policy Gradients

arXiv:2606. 06080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is widely used for post-training reasoning models, but sparse outcome rewards make exploration difficult.

By Shota Takashiro, Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas, Yongmin Kim, Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Yusuke Iwasawa, Takeshi Kojima, Yutaka Matsuo