arXiv AI

PG-SFT: Balancing Capability Acquisition and Retention in Offline Agent Fine-Tuning

PG-SFT: Balancing Capability Acquisition and Retention in Offline Agent Fine-Tuning explores how to maintain a model’s existing abilities while teaching it new ones through supervised fine‑tuning on offline agent trajectories. The authors compare standard SFT, KL‑penalty, and update‑magnitude constraints, finding that these methods still degrade non‑target capabilities. They introduce Privilege‑Guided SFT (PG‑SFT), which uses turn‑level information gain to modulate supervision strength, achieving a better trade‑off between acquiring new skills and preserving existing ones, though with a slight drop in target‑task performance.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

SCOPE: Signal-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation Enhancement with Dual-Path Adaptive Weighting

arXiv:2604. 10688v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult.

By Binbin Zheng, Xing Ma, Yiheng Liang, Jingqing Ruan, Xiaoliang Fu, Kepeng Lin, Benchang Zhu, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Don't Mask the Environment: Observation Supervision Changes How Agents Explore Under RL

The paper introduces ActObs, a supervised fine‑tuning method that, unlike standard approaches, also predicts environment observations in agent trajectories. While both ActObs and action‑only training perform similarly after initial fine‑tuning, ActObs diverges during subsequent reinforcement learning, yielding higher pass@k scores on several benchmarks and better cross‑domain task performance. The authors attribute this advantage to ActObs’s joint supervision, which preserves observation gradients and prevents the policy from over‑specializing on actions alone.

By Juzheng Zhang, Disha Makhija, Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Rashmi Gangadharaiah
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

T1: Terminal Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks

The paper introduces T1, a 122‑billion‑parameter Mixture‑of‑Experts model trained with reinforcement learning to perform long‑horizon terminal tasks such as coding and scientific discovery. T1 operates a real shell in a cloud sandbox, making over 300 tool‑call turns per task and receiving rewards from task‑specific verifiers. The authors detail a training recipe that includes aggressive warm‑starting, TITO construction with drift repair, and rollout‑routing replay, achieving significant performance gains on Terminal‑Bench 2.1 and surpassing GPT‑5.4 and GLM‑5.1 on the Long‑Horizon Terminal Bench.

By Junyao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Zongxia Li, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Online Self-Weighted Fine-Tuning

Online Self-Weighted Fine‑Tuning (OSW‑FT) augments standard supervised fine‑tuning by adding online, trajectory‑level weighting: for each query the model estimates its current success rate from a small number of inference‑only rollouts and rescales the SFT loss accordingly. The method keeps the optimization direction anchored to the expert trajectory while adapting the update magnitude online, and it is shown to be unbiased for any finite rollout count with a convergence analysis. Across Qwen3 models from 0.6B to 4B, OSW‑FT consistently outperforms plain SFT on challenging benchmarks such as AIME, achieving a favorable compute‑performance trade‑off with only two online rollouts.

By Haiquan Wen, Yiwei He, Bei Peng, Guangliang Cheng