Reward Engine is a method for creating a reward function for open‑ended tool agents by first determining what success looks like and then optimizing toward it. It builds a RewardPack of test cases and rubrics from initial trajectories, which is frozen and used to guide the agent’s output selection and can also serve as a reinforcement‑learning reward. Experiments on WorkBuddy Bench Office and Claw‑Eval show that the constructed reward aligns with benchmark graders on most candidate pairs and improves three‑run consistency from 45.0% to 54.0% and from 78.4% to 83.7%.
arXiv:2607. 14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A self-evolving agentic loop repeatedly proposes a tweaked version of an agent (its prompt template or program) and accepts or rejects the change based on a per-iteration quality signal.
The paper introduces Behavioral Self-Rewarding (BSR), a method that lets reinforcement learning agents with verifiable rewards judge and compare their own debugging trajectories to generate additional bounded auxiliary rewards. BSR aggregates pairwise preferences among trajectories that share the same verifier outcome, adding reward contrast while maintaining the original pass/fail ordering. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified and SWE-bench-Live with Qwen3-14B and Qwen3-32B show consistent performance gains, demonstrating that a policy’s own comparative judgments can serve as a useful learning signal.
StoreBench is a live‑commerce environment where an autonomous agent runs a mid‑size online apparel store on a production‑grade backend, facing continuous customer orders, supplier price changes, and market shocks. The agent uses the same 29 merchant tools as a human operator, with a windowed operation budget that ties simulated time to actions, ensuring that model latency does not affect the simulation. Seven large language models were evaluated across 11 scenarios of 30–45 days and a full simulated year, but none matched the scripted smart‑triage policy, and human experts outperformed all models.
arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.
AgentRM proposes a generalizable reward model to guide LLM-based agents during test-time search, outperforming direct policy fine-tuning. Three reward modeling strategies—explicit, implicit, and LLM-as-a-judge—are explored, and AgentRM improves base policy performance by an average of 8.8 points across nine tasks, surpassing top general agents by 4.0 points. It also shows strong weak-to-strong generalization and can boost specialized agents, with plans to release code for further research.
arXiv:2606. 27369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for training LLMs typically rely on ground-truth answers to assign rewards, limiting their applicability to tasks where the ground-truth solution is unknown.
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...
EvalResearchBench (ERB) is a benchmark that tests whether AI agents can autonomously design evaluation tasks for recursive self‑improvement. In ERB, a researcher agent selects or synthesizes tasks, builds graders, and refines them through pilot tests before producing a final evaluator that runs within fixed time and API budgets. Experiments with nine researchers and thirteen candidate models show that the best automated evaluators achieve about 75% concordance with target benchmarks, below the 91% ceiling set by target disagreements, and that human‑designed task samples still outperform many automated approaches.
arXiv:2603. 05659v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference answers.
arXiv:2607. 23263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deciding whether a trajectory actually fulfills its instruction governs how we measure computer-use agents on long-horizon graphical-user-interface tasks and how we train them with reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2609. 37968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in the coding capabilities of LLM agents allow them to inspect and modify their own instructions, tools, and execution procedures.
The paper introduces AdaptRubric, a Coarse-to-Fine Rubrics Framework designed to create task‑adaptive judging criteria for GUI reward modeling. It first retrieves a category‑level coarse rubric by mapping instructions to a GUI task family, then generates an instance‑level fine rubric that captures specific values, scopes, and constraints from the instruction. Experiments show that AdaptRubric outperforms existing reward agents, improving F1 by 3.6 points and achieving a 4.23‑point task‑success gain under a matched image budget.