arXiv AI

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

arXiv:2510. 18383v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application.

arXiv AI
Aug 12

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

MATCH: Model-Aware Tool Learning with Curriculum Scheduling and Hierarchically Gated Rewards

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

ToolSearcher: Optimizing Tool Selection at Scale via Reinforcement Learning

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
arXiv AI
4d ago

LiteGUI: Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-Solution Guided Distillation and Dual-Level Reinforcement Learning

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
arXiv AI
4d ago

PIVOT: Perplexity-Informed KD-to-RL Transition Scheduling for Vertical-Domain Few-Shot Distillation

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

DE-Venus: A Data-Efficient RLVR Framework for Large Language Models

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 AI
Aug 19

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

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