arXiv AI By Yongqi Tong, Tan Li Hui Faith, Choy Zhen Wen Marcus, Zhou Jin, Kewei Fu, Jiang-Ming Yang, Jianshe Li, Xin Zhang

ARC: Fair Relative Advantage Comparison in Open-Ended Real-World Interaction

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2608. 13622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended real-world interaction admits multiple valid behaviors: an agent may answer directly, ask for clarification, provide progress updates, or confirm before acting.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning Generalizable Behaviors for Terminal Agents

The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.

By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

GD$^2$PO: Mitigating Multi-Reward Conflicts via Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606. 16771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs advance, post-training reinforcement learning (RL) increasingly relies on multi-dimensional rewards to cultivate comprehensive capabilities.

By Haotian Liu, Yihao Liu, Jingwei Ni, Siyuan Huang, Xinpeng Liu, Pengyu Cheng, Jiajun Song, Ruijin Ding, Junfeng Li, Zhechao Yu, Mengyu Zhou, Hongteng Xu, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Spurious Tool Use: When RL Agents Learn the Wrong Reason to Act

The paper investigates how reinforcement learning can cause large language model agents to adopt shortcut policies for tool use, relying on superficial prompt cues rather than actual task needs. By creating synthetic environments that mix factual QA and math reasoning, the authors show that agents often invoke tools when cues are present, even when those tools are unnecessary, with spurious invocation rates rising up to 39%. They find that shortcut learning occurs mainly when agents have already mastered the target tool and that semantic alignment between cues and tools amplifies the effect. To counter this, they propose a dense, decision-level reward where an LLM judge assesses tool necessity, which reduces cue-driven tool use while maintaining performance.

By Yiwei Yang, Haoxiang Zhang, Bingbing Wen, Yao Lu, Yuchen Wu, Lei Zhang, Julian McAuley, Pan Lu, Bill Howe
arXiv AI
Sep 18

UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

UnifiedPlayers is a cooperative framework that jointly adapts planning, execution, and evaluation for tool-integrated reinforcement learning agents. It consists of a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that creates multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that builds executable verifiers, all coordinated by role‑specific rewards under GRPO. The approach outperforms prior baselines on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks and yields a verifier with high adversarial detection accuracy and more discriminative reward signals.

By Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao