arXiv:2607. 13501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for multi-turn search reasoning typically relies on terminal outcome rewards, which cannot distinguish useful, redundant, and harmful intermediate interactions.
By Qiang Zhu, Jiajun Wu
Reinforcement learning for multi-turn search reasoning typically relies on terminal outcome rewards, which cannot distinguish useful, redundant, and harmful intermediate interactions. We propose LOTAPO , a self-generated process-supervision method based on backward leave-one-turn attribution.
arXiv:2607. 13501v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for multi-turn search reasoning typically relies on terminal outcome rewards, which cannot distinguish useful, redundant, and harmful intermediate interactions.
By Qiang Zhu, Jiajun Wu, Longyi Wang
arXiv:2608. 07531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Search-augmented language agents should retrieve external information only when necessary and ground their answers in retrieved evidence.
By Cheng Ruoxi, Ma Haoxuan, Zhang Hongyi, Zhang Junming, Duan Ranjie, Xia Qiaolin, Wang Hao, Lu Yu, Shi Haibo, Ma Xingjun
The paper explores how dense, turn-level reward structures can improve reinforcement learning for large language model agents in multi-turn tasks. It introduces three reward granularity types—terminal, delayed, and per-turn—and adapts Group Relative Policy Optimization and Proximal Policy Optimization to each. Experiments on search and game agents show that per-turn rewards consistently yield better training dynamics, faster convergence, and higher answer correctness compared to sparse terminal or delayed rewards.
By Quan Wei, Siliang Zeng, Chenliang Li, Zhongruo Wang, William Brown, Oana Frunza, Wei Deng, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Yang Katie Zhao, Alfredo Garcia, Mingyi Hong
The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.
By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge