arXiv AI By Juzheng Zhang, Disha Makhija, Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Vinayshekhar Bannihatti Kumar, Rashmi Gangadharaiah

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

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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.

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