The paper introduces TASPO, a method that transforms privileged information (PI) into outcome‑grounded action credit for language‑model agents. TASPO constructs decision‑applicable PI from verified successful experience, aggregates PI‑induced likelihood shifts at the executable‑action level, and converts relative action support into positive, bounded, mean‑preserving weights on the original trajectory advantage. Experiments on three agentic benchmarks show TASPO improves over GRPO by 10.6% and generalizes better to unseen tasks, while reducing supervision mismatch and stabilizing policy optimization.
By Jingxiao Yang, Wangjie Gan, Yingxuan Zhuang, Wenqi Zhang, Jintao Chen, Xuhong Zhang
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
Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult. Existing approache...
The paper introduces CrEST, a hierarchical credit assignment framework for multi-turn, multi-step large language model agents. CrEST anchors each token’s advantage sign to verifier-defined rewards while using a self-teacher to provide dense magnitude signals, addressing both inter-turn dilution and intra-turn token contribution issues. Experiments on BFCL V3 and WildToolBench show CrEST consistently outperforms reinforcement learning and distillation baselines, especially on long trajectories and strict session-level metrics.
By Zechuan Wang, Siyuan Lu, Hongxuan Zhang, Linjian Mo, Chenyi Zhuang, Leilei Gan
arXiv:2606. 32017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning requires assigning credit to environment-facing actions such as searches, clicks, edits, navigation commands, and object interactions.
By Yuanda Xu, Zhengze Zhou, Hejian Sang, Xiaomin Li, Jiaxin Zhang, Xinchen Du, Zhipeng Wang, Alborz Geramifard
arXiv:2608. 05987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards constructs trajectory-level advantage estimates, yet it often fails to credit the few pivotal decisions that determine outcomes in long-horizon, multi-turn agentic tasks.
By Zi-Han Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Zhiyuan Yao, Jinyang Wu, Jie Wu, Zhengzhou Cai, Yueqing Sun, Ziang Ye, Linji Hao, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Yongliang Shen, Yujiu Yang
arXiv:2610.17733v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) evaluates responses against explicit criteria to construct rewards, offering a viable way to train large lan...
By Guangcheng Zhu, Yingfan Ma, Xing Zheng, Haobo Wang, Shenzhi Yang, Kai Tang, Zhengqing Zang, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
RISED introduces a framework that uses rubric-based textual feedback to improve training of a single large language model (LLM) agent across multiple interactive environments. By having an LLM judge tag rollouts with a shared rubric vocabulary, the system guides both online data selection and policy supervision, enabling richer cross‑environment relationships and within‑group reward contrast. Experiments show that RISED achieves the highest mean pass rate and ranks first or second in every individual environment, with rubric analysis revealing behavioural changes behind these gains.
By Jingtan Wang, Sirajul Salekin, Young mok Jung, Javier Movellan, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Manjot Bilkhu
The paper introduces Influence-Aware Policy Optimization (IAPO), a method that models multi‑turn agent rollouts as typed influence‑dependency graphs to better assign credit to actions based on how information and errors flow through user and tool interactions. IAPO transforms the structure of support and failure usage into routing weights that redistribute trajectory‑level advantage, enabling more effective learning from sparse final rewards. Experiments with Qwen3‑4B and Qwen3‑8B on three service‑agent benchmarks show that IAPO outperforms existing multi‑turn reinforcement learning baselines without harming function‑calling performance.
By Bo Ren, Yirong Mao, Yi Yang, Wenhui Que
AEM: Adaptive Entropy Modulation for Multi‑Turn Agentic Reinforcement Learning proposes a supervision‑free credit assignment technique that adjusts entropy dynamics at the response level during RL training. By aligning uncertainty estimation with the granularity of LLM agent actions and rescaling advantages based on a response‑level uncertainty proxy, AEM improves the exploration‑exploitation balance without relying on dense intermediate supervision. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SWE‑bench‑Verified show consistent performance gains across models from 1.5B to 32B, including a 1.4% improvement in a state‑of‑the‑art software‑engineering RL framework.
By Haotian Zhao, Songlin Zhou, Yuxin Zhang, Stephen S. -T. Yau, Wenyu Zhang, Lun Tian, Tianshu Zhu, Yifeng Huang, Yucheng Zeng, Jingnan Gu, Daxiang Dong, Jianmin Wu
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv:2607. 25659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning enriches language model training by evaluating model outputs against explicit criteria.
By Bo-Wen Zhang, Junwei He, Wen Wang, Song-Lin Lv, Wentao Ma, Rongyi Lin, Shuhan Zhong, Lan-Zhe Guo