The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.
arXiv:2608. 00335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compact web agents can reduce deployment cost, but training them poses challenges in both data collection and post-SFT reinforcement learning (RL).
arXiv:2610.18614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling an acting LLM agent means deciding, at each step of a long-horizon task, whether to trust its next action, abstain, or hand off to a human....
GraphOPD introduces a graph‑augmented on‑policy distillation method for large language model agents, addressing the shortcomings of existing divergence‑based guidance when rewards are sparse. By constructing a dependency graph from the environment’s state‑change record and applying a random‑walk stationary distribution, the method identifies and prioritizes the most impactful steps in a trajectory, fusing this structural credit with teacher‑student divergence signals. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA demonstrate that GraphOPD consistently outperforms eleven baselines, improving the strongest baseline by up to +5.8 percentage points and showing strong causal alignment through an executed‑replay audit.
Agentic Critical Training (ACT) is a reinforcement learning approach that trains language‑model agents to judge actions directly by pairing expert actions with alternatives and rewarding correct selection. Unlike imitation learning or self‑reflection, ACT does not require reference rationales and can be reused across model sizes. Experiments on Qwen3‑8B and Olmo‑3‑7B‑Instruct show that ACT improves performance on ALFWorld, WebShop, ScienceWorld, and outperforms supervised reflection baselines, with significant gains over IL and IL→RL baselines.
PROOF-Gen is a method that improves distillation of tool‑calling models by recovering successful trajectories from teacher failures. It uses per‑scenario prompt optimization to generate corrective guidance that steers the teacher to a passing trajectory, then removes this guidance before training so the student learns from clean demonstrations. On τ2‑bench, PROOF-Gen recovers 93% of failed scenarios, boosting Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507’s Pass^1 from 0.132 to 0.529 and improving Gemma 4 E4B‑it by 7.2pp on BFCL v4 multi‑turn, while also raising deployed on‑device model performance by up to 5.0pp across response‑quality metrics.
The paper introduces a denoised counterfactual protocol to accurately measure the selectable headroom of world action models (WAMs) and uses these measurements to build a fail‑gated selector. Across four WAMs and two benchmarks, the study shows that the standard estimate overstates selectable headroom, that structured action perturbations can add up to 16 points of headroom, and that imagined futures retain candidate‑outcome information without loss. The selector improves closed‑loop task success from 76.9 % to 81.6 % on held‑out training episodes and from 62.6 % to 69.8 % on unseen tasks.
The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.
The paper introduces CoPE, a method that trains language agents by adding multi‑step action targets to the policy backbone. By supervising each action forecasted from preceding histories, CoPE enables acting and forecasting to co‑evolve without extra inference cost. Across five benchmarks, CoPE outperforms existing RL baselines, achieving up to twice the sample efficiency on ScienceWorld and improving overall performance on realistic applications.
The paper introduces checkpoint handoff, an evaluation protocol that separates an agent’s ability to reach useful states from its ability to complete tasks in reinforcement learning. By using one checkpoint as a reacher up to a handoff point and another as a solver from the same replayed history, the authors can measure Reach (how often states within a fixed number of actions from success are achieved) and Solve (how often the task is completed from those states). Experiments on TravelPlanner and ALFWorld show that switching the solver from supervised fine‑tuning to RL yields larger gains when RL is used as the reacher, indicating that RL more effectively finds solvable states.
arXiv:2606. 04970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach.
arXiv:2607. 12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in particular, is now run routinely on a supervised checkpoint in the hope of producing a stronger agent.
arXiv:2609.21423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online agent deployments produce abundant execution traces, while task-specific verification and expert annotation are costly to scale. We study how to...