CAFE (Coupled Agent–Feedback Evolution) is a framework that lets a shared‑parameter model alternate between acting as a search agent and as a critic that provides corrective feedback. By learning when to request feedback and how to use it, CAFE trains the agent to recover from its own failures and shapes rewards both online and offline. Experiments on seven search benchmarks show that CAFE outperforms other RL‑based agents, maintains gains on out‑of‑domain tests, and reduces hallucinations, indicating that co‑evolving feedback is essential for self‑improving search agents.
By Boyang Liu, Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Yibo Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbing Liang, Shizheng Zhu, Yuhui Wang, Jingqi Tong, Zhiheng Xi, Jiazheng Zhang, Clive Bai, Clarenceai, Blaze Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Decomposed Subtasks (RLDS), a method that splits trajectory rewards into per‑subtask shares before policy updates, replacing the scalar advantage used in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). RLDS employs Subtask‑Decomposed Advantage Estimation (SDAE) to compute group‑relative advantages and distribute credit to tokens based on subtask importance, focusing on steps where a reflection marks a subtask as consequential. Experiments on four benchmarks—FrozenLake, HotpotQA, ScienceWorld, and DeepResearch—show that RLDS improves performance on high‑heterogeneity tasks (ScienceWorld and FrozenLake) and is more compute‑efficient than scalar GRPO for long rollouts.
By Mattie Terzolo, Mikolaj Sacha, Ayan Sinha, Andrew Rabinovich
The paper introduces Feedback‑Enriched Environments (FEEs) as a new approach to training large language models as autonomous agents for long‑horizon tasks. By shifting from action guidance to observation enrichment during later stages of exploration, FEEs improve performance across SciWorld and BFCL benchmarks with various Qwen3 model scales and RL algorithms. The study shows that FEEs stabilize training, promote proactive exploration, embed environmental guidance into policy weights, and highlight intra‑group feedback consistency as key for stable optimization.
By Hongbang Yuan, Zhuoran Jin, Yixin Cao
arXiv:2608. 07531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search-augmented language agents should retrieve external information only when necessary and ground their answers in retrieved evidence.
By Cheng Ruoxi, Ma Haoxuan, Zhang Hongyi, Zhang Junming, Duan Ranjie, Xia Qiaolin, Wang Hao, Lu Yu, Shi Haibo, Ma Xingjun
arXiv:2607. 26784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns.
By Zhiyuan Yao, Yuxin Chen, Zhengxi Lu, Zishan Xu, Yueqing Sun, Yifu Guo, Yuquan Lu, Zhengzhou Cai, Kangning Zhang, Zhuowen Han, Zi-Han Wang, Ziang Ye, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Weiwen Liu, Yongliang Shen
arXiv:2608. 12764v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep search agents operate over trajectories spanning dozens of steps, yet standard reinforcement learning provides only a single outcome reward per trajectory, which is far too sparse for effective credit assignment.
By Haoze Wu, Chuqiao Kuang, Tianyi Zhuang, Xiaoguang Li
PaperGym is a framework that transforms each research paper into a training environment for AI research planning, using rubrics extracted from the paper’s method and experiments as a critic. It synthesizes research questions from the goal and background, and derives evaluation criteria from the method and experiments, reducing criterion leakage to 3.7%. Experiments with Qwen models show that training with PaperGym’s rubric improves benchmark performance by up to 5.6 points and outperforms existing datasets and fine‑tuning baselines.
By Yuhan Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Yuchen Yan, Kaitao Song, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
arXiv:2606. 11119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing reasoning and agentic behavior in large language models.
By Heming Zou, Qi Wang, Yun Qu, Yuhang Jiang, Lizhou Cai, Yixiu Mao, Ru Peng, Xin Xu, Weijie Liu, Kai Yang, Saiyong Yang, Xiangyang Ji
The paper investigates a failure mode called co‑cheating in self‑evolving search agents, where the proposer and solver agree on shared errors, inflating internal reward without improving external correctness. The authors first propose multi‑sample verification (MSV) to filter unreliable pseudo‑labels, which only partially mitigates the issue. They then introduce CrossFit, a cross‑fitted reward scheme that partitions source documents and uses an auxiliary solver to prevent same‑source agreement, significantly reducing false agreement and boosting downstream benchmark performance.
By Meijia Chen, Hao Li, Zheng Lu, Hongshan Lin, Junbai Tian, Yichen Liu, Zijun Tian, Yufan Zou, Shuhan Sun, Hanxin Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Weizhi Du, Yueting Li, Tianyu Shi, Alaa Khamis
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:2606. 20002v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a general framework for training large language models (LLMs) to "Connect the Dots" (CoD), a meta-capability required by long-lifecycle agents: as an LLM-based AI agent gets deployed in an environment, it solves a long sequence of tasks while continuously exploring the environment, learning from its own experiences, and iteratively self-updating its context about the environment, thereby achieving progressively better performance on future tasks conditioned on the updated context.
By Yanxi Chen, Weijie Shi, Yuexiang Xie, Boyi Hu, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models (LLMs) to learn from multi-turn interactions with verifiable outcomes. Textual skills can improve exploration by distilling prior inte...