arXiv AI

AttnSR: Attention Step Reward for Long-Horizon Agentic RL

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

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.

By Changdae Oh, Wendi Li, Seongheon Park, Samuel Yeh, Tanwi Mallick, Sharon Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

VICT: Verifier-Instrumented Credit Tracing for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces VICT, a method that leverages the internal structure of verifiable tasks to perform fine‑grained credit assignment for long‑horizon LLM agents. VICT exposes executable or evidence‑backed atoms from a task’s terminal verifier and traces them back to actions via dependency‑valid proof edges, redistributing advantage only along these edges. This approach improves performance on ALFWorld and WebShop compared to outcome‑only training and matches recent fine‑grained credit methods without requiring additional critics, labels, or inference‑time verifier access.

By Pengcheng Li, Zhengyang Zhang, Dongxu Zhang, Sui Huang, Shaohua Ma
arXiv AI
Oct 31

SCOPE: Selective Critical-Step On-Policy Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

SCOPE is a new framework for selective critical‑step on‑policy self‑distillation in agentic reinforcement learning. After a supervised warm‑up, the policy examines its own trajectories, generates hindsight skills for each step, and distills guidance only at selected error steps, using a bounded teacher‑student coefficient and a success‑relative pairwise length reward. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show consistent performance gains across multiple model backbones, with Qwen2.5‑3B achieving 97.7 % success on ALFWorld and 85.2 % on WebShop, and Qwen3‑32B reaching 99.2 % on seen tasks and 94.0 % on unseen tasks.

By Qirui Liu, Wei Cao, Yu Mi, Yichen Sun, Xuekun Zhang, Lei Liu, Yue Shen, Zhixuan Chu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Don't Mask the Environment: Observation Supervision Changes How Agents Explore Under RL

The paper introduces ActObs, a supervised fine‑tuning method that, unlike standard approaches, also predicts environment observations in agent trajectories. While both ActObs and action‑only training perform similarly after initial fine‑tuning, ActObs diverges during subsequent reinforcement learning, yielding higher pass@k scores on several benchmarks and better cross‑domain task performance. The authors attribute this advantage to ActObs’s joint supervision, which preserves observation gradients and prevents the policy from over‑specializing on actions alone.

By Juzheng Zhang, Disha Makhija, Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Rashmi Gangadharaiah