arXiv Machine Learning

Active Curriculum Refinement for Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces PATH, a curriculum‑learning framework that actively refines reinforcement learning by exploiting the directed acyclic curriculum graph formed by prerequisite relations among environments. PATH first expands coverage by sampling diverse curriculum paths and then reallocates training toward regions that remain unmastered. Experiments across diverse environments demonstrate that explicitly leveraging the graph structure leads to strong robustness and generalization.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

CanvasAnneal is a curriculum‑guided reinforcement learning framework designed to improve Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) on complex reasoning and tool‑use tasks. It starts training by injecting reasoning traces from a stronger teacher model into the diffusion canvas, then gradually reduces this guidance so the model learns to generate reasoning independently. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and tool‑use benchmarks show that CanvasAnneal outperforms standard diffusion RL methods such as diffu‑GRPO on tasks like MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2, and accelerates reward improvement, though the gains vary by task.

By Blake Olson, Yuhang Song, Emmett McQuinn, Yuan Shangguan
arXiv AI
Oct 5

EVOL: Simulator-Guided Evolutionary Expert Synthesis for Deployment-Free Learning Path Recommendation

EVOL is a framework that uses a knowledge‑tracing simulator to generate per‑learner expert demonstrations via evolutionary search, and then trains a deployment‑free policy that distills these demonstrations into a feed‑forward learner. The method employs an asymmetric actor‑critic architecture, where the actor plans blindly as in real deployment while the critic has access to privileged simulator state during training. Across three educational datasets and varying path lengths, EVOL outperforms eight baselines and shows that the quality of evolutionary experts, rather than the imitation objective, drives final performance.

By Geonwoo Bang, Dongho Kim, Moohong Min
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Selective Agent Guidance via Entropy: Learning Autonomous Policies from Imperfect VLM Teachers

The paper introduces SAGE, a framework that selectively queries a Vision‑Language Model (VLM) teacher only when the learner is uncertain, using the teacher’s suggestions to guide training and distill them into a lightweight reinforcement learning policy. SAGE weights teacher actions by environment‑derived advantages, allowing the policy to improve beyond the imperfect VLM. Experiments on sparse‑reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks show that the learned policies can act without VLM guidance at evaluation, reduce VLM usage during training, and sometimes outperform the teacher itself.

By Matteo Merler, Giovanni Bonetta, Davide Zago, Rossella Cancelliere, Bernardo Magnini
arXiv AI
Oct 2

ActiveSaddler: Automated Curriculum Learning for Agent Harness Optimization

ActiveSaddler introduces automated curriculum learning for harness optimization, treating the evolving training curriculum as a non‑stationary bandit problem. It identifies reusable failure patterns, estimates learning progress for each, and balances revisiting known weaknesses with exploring new scenarios, allowing the curriculum to co‑evolve with the harness. Experiments on GAIA2 and Terminal‑Bench 2.0 show consistent improvements in harness performance, with Pass@1 gains of 4.4 and 7.5 percentage points over fixed‑order baselines.

By Sungho Park, Wonjoong Kim, Jue Zhang, Wook-Shin Han, Pengfei Gao, Chanyoung Park, Yongqiang Yao, Rao Fu, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Victor R\"uhle
arXiv AI
Jul 7

ARLArena: A Unified Framework for Stable Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602. 21534v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (ARL) has rapidly gained attention as a promising paradigm for training agents to solve complex, multi-step interactive tasks.

By Xiaoxuan Wang, Han Zhang, Haixin Wang, Yidan Shi, Ruoyan Li, Kaiqiao Han, Chenyi Tong, Haoran Deng, Renliang Sun, Alexander Taylor, Yanqiao Zhu, Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang