arXiv:2601. 03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.
By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.
MATCH is a closed‑loop framework for model‑aware tool learning that combines curriculum scheduling with hierarchically gated rewards. It introduces Model‑Aware Curriculum Learning (MACL), which dynamically adjusts sample difficulty based on reward signals, and Hierarchical Tool‑call Gated Reward (HTGR), which allocates credit at the tool name, argument key, and argument value levels only when prerequisites are met. Experiments on API‑Bank and BFCL V3 show MATCH achieving 72.19% and 62.87% overall accuracy, outperforming both supervised and RL‑based baselines across multiple backbone models.
By Shihao Liu, Hao Yin, Lijun Liu, Zhengzong Chen, Yuanyuan Zhao, Fei Huang
ToolSearcher is a reinforcement learning framework designed to improve large‑scale tool selection for large language models. It introduces category‑constrained discrimination, event‑level search modeling, and trajectory‑aligned credit allocation to better distinguish similar tools, optimize multi‑turn search, and provide fine‑grained rewards. Experiments on large‑scale benchmarks show that ToolSearcher outperforms strong baselines in iterative search and complex tool composition scenarios.
By Zhenlong Dai, Xujie Song, Zitong Wang, Tong Niu, Jian liu, Weiqiang Wang, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Chang Yao, Jingyuan Chen
Conventional language-model distillation often relies on fixed teacher-generated data, which may not cover the states encountered by an evolving student policy. On-policy distillation (OPD) instead collects teacher or evaluator supervision on student-generated rollouts.
LiteGUI is a new framework for training lightweight GUI agents that tackles the long‑horizon, multi‑path nature of GUI interactions. It introduces a two‑stage post‑training pipeline: Guided On‑Policy Distillation, which uses human‑verified multi‑solution action annotations to provide privileged teacher guidance at each state, and Multi‑Solution Dual‑Level GRPO, which combines action‑level supervision with history‑conditioned planning‑quality supervision while handling multiple valid actions. The authors also present a scalable data generation pipeline and the Lite‑Dataset, enabling extensive evaluation across GUI benchmarks and demonstrating substantial performance gains over existing training paradigms.
By Yubin Wu, Zicheng Cai, Liping Ning, Hua Wang, Zhi Chen, Yaohua Tang, Hao Chen
PIVOT introduces a dynamic transition framework for vertical-domain few-shot distillation, routing samples between On-Policy Distillation (OPD) and GRPO-based reinforcement learning based on teacher-evaluated perplexity. Low-perplexity samples are moved to GRPO for reward-driven refinement, while high-perplexity samples remain under OPD to continue acquiring domain knowledge. Experiments on Banking77 and HWU64 demonstrate that PIVOT outperforms both continued OPD and globally synchronized OPD→GRPO baselines, achieving stronger downstream performance and more stable training dynamics.
By Heng Li, Yong Zhang, Ning Cheng, Zhigen Li, Yun Zhu, Yanmeng Wang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao
DE‑Venus is a unified, data‑efficient framework for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) tailored to large language models. It structures the RLVR lifecycle into three modules—Active Data Selection, Weak Supervision Construction, and Training‑Time Supervision Refinement—allowing method‑specific decisions to be expressed as dataset transitions or online transformations while maintaining distributed execution contracts. Experiments on public benchmarks and three business scenarios show that DE‑Venus can preserve or improve model quality using only 10% of labels or 13% of relevant data, and can cut convergence steps by 63%–75% in selected business configurations.
By Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Kai Tang, Zhengqing Zang, Xing Zheng, Haobo Wang, Yingfan Ma, Bowen Song, Bo Han, Bo An, Lei Feng, Weiqiang Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen
arXiv:2608.24696v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and on-policy distillation (OPD) have become two widely adopted paradigms for post-training lar...
By Wenze Lin, Jiale Zhao, Xitai Jiang, Songde Rao, Yining Li, Shenzhi Wang, Bingxiang He, Gao Huang
SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.
By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang
arXiv:2607. 27973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for the post-training of Large Language Model (LLM) agents.
By Cong Li, Peixi Peng, Yisen Zhao, Xinyu Hu, Shudong Liu, Zhan Su, Zhuojian Li