arXiv:2610.17666v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for multi-turn agents relies on sparse terminal rewards that say little about individual steps....
By Xuyan Ye, Xiyan Fu, Shengda Fan, Jiawei Cui, Yankai Lin, Wei Lu
Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult. Existing approache...
arXiv:2609.36864v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Group-relative methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn from differences in rollout outcomes. Independently sampling com...
By Fanchao Chen, Hengyu Fu, Shivaram Venkataraman, Jiantao Jiao
arXiv:2608. 16156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult.
By Huan Zhang, Mingju Chen, Dongxu Zhou, Can Lv, Heng Chang, Sen Cui, Faguo Wu, Shiji Zhou
arXiv:2609.27532v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-horizon agentic tasks require an agent to modify an environment through a sequence of tool calls, with success determined by the final state. The...
By Ming Ma, Yi Zhu, Yiran Zhong, Feida Zhu, Chonghan Liu, Pengkun Jiao, Qichao Wang, Yanhao Jia, Tianming Yang, Steven Hoi
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
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:2609.36641v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Process reward models (PRMs) have become a key component for LLMs, as their step-level feedback supports both post-training and test-time reasoning....
By Shengda Fan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin
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:2607. 21419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-horizon LLM agent reinforcement learning, weak policies often repeat similar failures, producing uninformative rollout trajectories and limiting effective policy optimization.
By Yipeng Shi, Zhipeng Ma, Yue Wang, Qitai Tan, Yang Li, Peng Chen, Zhengzhou Zhu
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
arXiv:2605. 17877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A significant hurdle for current LLMs is the execution of complex, multi-stage tasks.
By Wonjoong Kim, Yeonjun In, Sangwu Park, Dongha Lee, Chanyoung Park