arXiv AI

DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping

DeepPlanner is an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the planning capabilities of deep research agents. It introduces an entropy-based advantage shaping mechanism that allocates larger updates to high-entropy planning tokens and selectively upweights sample-level advantages during planning-intensive rollouts. Experiments on seven deep research benchmarks show that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state‑of‑the‑art results with a lower training budget.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 27

QUEST: Training Frontier Deep Research Agents with Fully Synthetic Tasks

arXiv:2605.24218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep research agents extend the role of search engines from retrieving keyword-matched pages to synthesizing knowledge, fundamentally changing how...

By Jian Xie, Tianhe Lin, Zilu Wang, Yuting Ning, Yuekun Yao, Tianci Xue, Zhehao Zhang, Zhongyang Li, Kai Zhang, Yufan Wu, Shijie Chen, Boyu Gou, Mingzhe Han, Yifei Wang, Vint Lee, Xinpeng Wei, Xiangjun Wang, Yu Su, Huan Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Enhancing Language Model Reasoning with Structured Multi-Level Modeling

The paper introduces Multi-Level Reasoning (MLR), a two-level stochastic framework that separates long chain-of-thought generation into a high-level planner producing structured step descriptors and a low-level executor generating detailed reasoning. MLR replaces single-policy reinforcement learning with an iterative Step‑DPO preference optimization that uses Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo for scalable, stepwise supervision, improving training stability and accuracy. Experiments on math, science, and logic benchmarks show that MLR outperforms both supervised fine‑tuning and strong RL baselines while maintaining robustness over extended reasoning horizons.

By Siheng Xiong, Ali Payani, Faramarz Fekri
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 AI
Sep 3

APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answering

APEx is a hierarchical framework that organizes a deep research agent’s interaction history into instance-level trajectory memories and category-level procedural skills. It couples these through an Executor, Distiller, and Planner, trained with a three-stage alternating GRPO paradigm to enable reward-guided skill distillation. At test time, distilled skills act as procedural priors for online Planner adaptation via skill-guided reinforcement learning, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on seven benchmarks, outperforming GPT‑5.4 by 14.7 points and the best memory‑augmented baseline by 3.0 points.

By Jie Ding, Rui Sun, Xinyuan Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Xin Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Rollout-Time Intervention: Unlocking Agentic Reinforcement Learning Beyond Policy Limits

The paper introduces Rollout-Time Intervention (RTI), a method that uses reward-side evidence during rollouts to transform unsuccessful trajectories into successful ones, thereby providing learning signals for tasks beyond a policy’s intrinsic exploration limits. RTI filters out trajectories with excessive distributional shifts, allowing these off-policy interventions to guide policy optimization effectively. Experiments on five benchmarks show that RTI consistently outperforms existing RL baselines, enabling post-trained policies to approach the performance of stronger large language models and surpass their original capability boundaries.

By Chen Xi, Ding Ruixue, Wang Zhigaoyuan, Zhang Fanrui, Zhang Qiang, Chen Boli, Wang Shihang, Wang Tianfu, Ren Ailin, Wang Pengyong, Xie Pengjun, Xiong Hui
arXiv AI
Aug 19

PlanPO: Group Planning-Aware Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic LLMs

PlanPO introduces a group planning-aware policy optimization method for multi-turn agentic large language models, addressing the issue of advantage collapse caused by treating all successful trajectories equally. By incorporating coarse-to-fine advantage signals that reflect differences in trajectory and turn lengths, PlanPO encourages agents to learn generalizable planning and generation behaviors. Experiments show a 27.2% average improvement over GRPO on benchmarks such as ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, with minimal extra training cost.

By Dayang Liang, Liyuan He, Xuan Feng, Shuxin Li, Bo An, Yunlong Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

RubricEM: Meta-RL with Rubric-guided Policy Decomposition beyond Verifiable Rewards

RubricEM is a unified reinforcement learning framework designed for deep research agents that plan, search, evaluate evidence, and synthesize long‑form reports. It introduces rubric‑guided policy decomposition, combining supervised fine‑tuning to scaffold agents with rubrics, stage‑structured GRPO for fine‑grained credit assignment, and a reflection meta‑policy for experience reuse. The resulting RubricEM‑8B model outperforms larger open models on four long‑form research benchmarks and approaches the performance of proprietary deep‑research systems.

By Gaotang Li, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Zifeng Wang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Chun-Liang Li, Long T. Le, Rujun Han, George Lee, Hanghang Tong, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
arXiv AI
Oct 28

Guided-RLVR: Guided Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Guided-RLVR introduces a lightweight controller to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), injecting semantically meaningful steering tokens into the sampling distribution. This strategy encourages large language models to explore multiple reasoning perspectives, expanding the set of reasoning trajectories. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that Guided-RLVR consistently outperforms existing RLVR methods while producing more diverse reasoning paths.

By Bo Yang, Zishuai Zhang, Weihua Li, Qinnan Zhang, Sijia Wen, Hainan Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

IDRBench: Benchmarking the Interactive Capabilities of Deep Research Agents

IDRBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the interactive capabilities of deep research agents that use large language models. It introduces controlled opportunities for clarification within a common workflow, comparing autonomous and interactive trajectories by measuring task‑specific report alignment and interaction cost. Experiments on 100 tasks with seven LLMs show that interaction consistently improves alignment, though its effectiveness varies depending on the agents’ questions and feedback integration.

By Yingchaojie Feng, Qiang Huang, Xiaoya Xie, Zhaorui Yang, Jun Yu, Wei Chen, Anthony K. H. Tung