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:2606. 17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model.
By Violet Xiang, Amrith Setlur, Chase Blagden, Nick Haber, Aviral Kumar
arXiv:2607. 25308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) to act in long-horizon games is a promising step toward generalist decision-making, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) relies on sparse final rewards that reveal little about which decisions determine success.
By Yu Wang, Yi-Kai Zhang, Wentao Shi, Ziang Ye, Yuchun Miao, Yueqing Sun, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Lan-Zhe Guo, Han-Jia Ye, Fuli Feng
arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.
By Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Seungju Han, Sheng Liu, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Pan Lu
arXiv:2608. 03223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn through interaction, but sparse trajectory-level rewards reveal success without identifying which intermediate decisions deserve credit.
By Ranxu Zhang, Guinan Chen, Chenshaodong, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhou Xu, Sunzhe, Yanyong Zhang, Chao Wang
arXiv:2601. 19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks.
By Octavio Pappalardo
The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.
By Liming Pu, Xiaoxia Li, Yifu Liu, Teng Cao, Bin Yang
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
arXiv:2608. 05102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon search agents must make multiple sequential actions (steps) to search, retrieve, verify, and integrate evidence to reach a final answer.
By Yijun Lu, Rui Ye, Jiajun Wang, Yuwen Du, Tian Jin, Songhua Liu, Siheng Chen
arXiv:2605.11467v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reasoning models post-hoc rationalize answers they have already committed to internally, producing chains of *reasoning theater*: deliberativ...
By Swapnil Parekh, Naman Goyal
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
arXiv:2608.23493v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However,...
By Jialong Liu, Yuling Shi, Ning Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Zuchao Li