The paper explores a runtime strategy-selection framework where a large language model (LLM) guides a pre‑trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy for non‑player characters (NPCs) in a Unity combat game without altering the underlying policy. Five NPC agents sharing a PPO policy were compared in a baseline setup and an LLM‑augmented setup, where a locally hosted Mistral 7B model assigns one of four tactical tags every five seconds based on live game state. Across 600 episodes against three scripted opponents, the LLM‑augmented agents more than doubled their win rate against a Balanced opponent, improved performance against an Evasive opponent, but struggled against an Aggressive opponent due to over‑reliance on encirclement; analysis of 2,430 strategy selections revealed limited zero‑shot differentiation with the model favoring Surround in 83.8% of cases.
By Hrithika Deepu Nair, Kayvan Karim
arXiv:2508. 14751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study goal-conditioned reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with sparse rewards and large, structured goal spaces.
By Thomas Carta, Cl\'ement Romac, Loris Gaven, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Olivier Sigaud, Sylvain Lamprier
arXiv:2608. 06735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong results in improving large language models (LLMs) on tasks with stationary, verifiable rewards, such as mathematical reasoning and code execution.
By Senhao Wang, Chenghao Cai, Haitao Hu, Mingxing Huang, Xingguang Wang, Wenhao Li, Zecheng Lin
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
CoSkill introduces a unified multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework that jointly trains a Reasoning Agent and a learnable Meta‑Skill Agent over a hierarchical skill library. By treating the meta‑skill workflow as a trainable agent and sharing a single backbone, CoSkill enables end‑to‑end co‑adaptation, allowing the Reasoning Agent to condition actions on retrieved task and step skills while the Meta‑Skill Agent refines those skills based on task performance. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that CoSkill outperforms prior skill‑based and RL baselines, achieving higher success rates and improved sample, asymptotic, and wall‑clock efficiency.
By Jinyuan Feng, Dongmin Li, Yiqun Chen, Yang Gao, Xing Chen, Huimu Wang, Zhiqiang Pu
arXiv:2607. 05458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are usually improved by changing prompts, models, or hand-written workflows, while the execution harness around the model is treated as fixed infrastructure.
By Haiwen Yi, Xinyuan Song