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
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2608. 02508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning-based memory systems for self-evolving LLM agents face two tightly coupled challenges.
By Yi Yang, Zhennan Chen, Yihong Zhuang, Tiehan Fan, Yinan Chen, Jian Li, Jian Yang, Ying Tai
arXiv:2607. 11953v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Does a reinforcement-learning agent that earns high reward represent its task's latent state, or only a reward-correlated shortcut?
By Jim Allchin
arXiv:2606. 27909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Theory-of-mind evaluations of large language models typically use dyadic social-deduction games, where every observable cue points to a single hidden side, so a model with strong language priors can score well without ever simulating opponents' incentives.
By Avni Mittal
arXiv:2607. 04470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a natural interface for translating human objectives into reward signals for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), yet the training-time dynamics of this integration remain poorly understood.
By Faid Keddouri, Sohaib Houhou, Aissa Boulmerka, Nadir Farhi
arXiv:2608. 11658v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many reinforcement learning systems, from fleet management to traffic signal control, must serve an objective that changes dynamically after deployment, and retraining a policy for each new objective is prohibitively expensive.
By Zijian Zhao, Sen Li
arXiv:2607. 07435v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents acting on our behalf in the real world (e.
By Bojie Li, Noah Shi
arXiv:2605. 24202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM workflows route inference through specialized roles to lift end-task accuracy, but jointly training those roles with reinforcement learning is unstable in ways that are poorly understood.
By Yifan Zeng, Yiran Wu, Yaolun Zhang, Wentian Zhao, Kun Wan, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang
Translating natural-language planning intent into verified plans is a longstanding challenge: people communicate goals in language, while classical planners require formal PDDL specifications. Recent agentic frameworks bridge this gap by orchestrating a pool of specialized repair agents inside a verifier-checked refinement loop, but the orchestrator at the centre is itself a prompted frontier LLM, paying a frontier-LLM API call at every refinement step.
arXiv:2511. 10687v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise for complex tasks, yet current training methods lack principled ways to connect system-level evaluation with agent- and message-level learning.
By Chih-Hsuan (Bella), Yang, Tanwi Mallick, Le Chen, Krishnan Raghavan, Amal Gueroudji, Ian T. Foster, Rajeev Thakur
The paper introduces neuro‑symbolic computer use, a method that learns reusable policies to execute recurring computer workflows efficiently. Instead of re‑planning each run, the learned policy encodes stable decisions (ordering, variables, loops, branches) into executable code while delegating observation‑dependent decisions to neural models. Using neuro‑symbolic policy iteration, the approach iteratively refines the policy from a single agent trajectory, diagnoses failures, and revises the code with a coding model, achieving superior Pass^3 scores and significant reductions in per‑run cost and latency on OSWorld‑Verified and ScienceBoard benchmarks.
By Hyewon Suh, Thanh Minh Nguyen, Chih-Lun Lee, Darrow Hartman, Lizhao Liu, Xin Eric Wang, Ang Li, Jiachen Yang