arXiv AI By Hangxi Guo, Fengyuan Liu, Yue Wang, Yuhua Qi, Haoyi Xiong, Fei Sun, Mengnan Du

Environmental Feedback Modeling Matters: Rethinking Feedback Treatment in Agentic Hindsight Self-Distillation

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The paper introduces SELF, a framework that jointly optimizes environmental feedback modeling and hindsight self-distillation for language agents in reinforcement learning settings where rewards are unavailable. SELF predicts environmental responses while distilling guidance from a feedback-conditioned self-teacher into the policy, creating a mutually reinforcing mechanism that strengthens both supervision and policy learning. Experiments with Qwen3-8B show that SELF outperforms SDPO and GRPO on $ au$-bench and AppWorld tasks, improving success rates and goal completion.

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