arXiv Machine Learning

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents

arXiv:2508. 14751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study goal-conditioned reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with sparse rewards and large, structured goal spaces.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

ArenaFlow: From Trajectory Ranking to Hierarchical Credit Propagation for Open-Ended Agent RL

ArenaFlow is a hierarchical credit propagation framework designed to improve reinforcement learning for open-ended agent tasks. It uses tournament-based relative ranking to generate trajectory-level rewards and structured reflective evaluation to identify pivotal success steps, reusable strategy skills, and skill usage attribution. The framework propagates advantages to high-confidence steps and maintains a global skill memory, enabling more targeted optimization and reusable skill priors for future exploration.

By Qiang Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Fanrui Zhang, Xi Chen, Boli Chen, Shihang Wang, Yinfeng Huang, Yi Zheng, Pengjun Xie, Kaipeng Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv AI
Jun 10

HIPIF: Hierarchical Planning and Information Folding for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Learning

arXiv:2606. 10507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities as autonomous agents across a wide range of tasks, their performance often degrades in multi-turn long-horizon agentic tasks.

By Juncheng Diao, Zhicong Lu, Peiguang Li, Yongwei Zhou, Changyuan Tian, Qingbin Li, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

arXiv:2606. 20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies.

By Jannik H\"osch, Alessandro Sestini, Florian Fuchs, Amir Baghi, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar, Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre, Linus Gissl\'en
arXiv AI
Sep 18

UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

UnifiedPlayers is a cooperative framework that jointly adapts planning, execution, and evaluation for tool-integrated reinforcement learning agents. It consists of a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that creates multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that builds executable verifiers, all coordinated by role‑specific rewards under GRPO. The approach outperforms prior baselines on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks and yields a verifier with high adversarial detection accuracy and more discriminative reward signals.

By Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao
arXiv AI
Aug 24

AUSO: Action-Level Unified Skill Optimization from Internalization to Utilization

AUSO (Action-level Unified Skill Optimization) is a method that unifies skill learning and skill use through a progressive, action-aware optimization process. It starts by jointly learning from teacher guidance and environmental outcomes, then shifts to outcome-based policy optimization, and finally evaluates each action under skill-conditioned and skill-free contexts to strengthen beneficial skill-sensitive actions while suppressing harmful ones. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA demonstrate that AUSO consistently improves agent performance and out-of-distribution generalization compared to competitive baselines.

By Huizu Lin, Chengkai Huang, Tianqi Gao, Tao Huang, Daijiao Liu, Tongxin Li, Xiaoyan Sun, Lina Yao