arXiv AI By Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Ziyue Peng, Zheng Lin, Shuo Yang, Jinze Li, Zheng Xing, Mengran Li, Victor C. M. Leung

Learning What to Skip: Counterfactual Credit Assignment for Efficient Multi-Agent LLM Workflows

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper introduces Learning What to Skip (LW2S), a method that learns when to omit components in multi‑agent LLM workflows by treating omission as counterfactual credit assignment. LW2S builds action‑specific safety models from controlled skip interventions and uses calibration plus domain‑native guards to decide which steps to skip. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, multiple‑choice QA, and code generation show that LW2S cuts token cost while maintaining or improving overall accuracy, and further studies reveal component redundancy and limitations of agreement‑based skip selection.

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 AI
Jul 23

In-the-Flow Agentic System Optimization for Effective Planning and Tool Use

arXiv:2510. 05592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalizes weakly to new scenarios.

By Zhuofeng Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Seungju Han, Sheng Liu, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang, Yejin Choi, James Zou, Pan Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Success Leaves Detours: Learning Executable Walkthroughs for Long-Horizon Agents

The paper introduces Trace, a framework that transforms sparse-reward trajectories into executable walkthroughs by identifying progress anchors, propagating credit, and estimating action prerequisites. Trace compiles noisy trajectories into state‑conditioned, verifiable procedures that remove loops and detours, enabling reuse, intermediate‑state resumption, and programmatic verification. Experiments on J‑TTL, WebShop, and ScienceWorld with three open‑source LLMs show that Trace outperforms eight baselines, improving average AUC and Final‑$3$ by 30.0% and 40.5% while using fewer inference tokens.

By Kaijie Chen, Chenyu Fang, Liang Yan, Bo Li, Bo Zhang, Peng Ye
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603. 21563v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding.

By Zhongyi Li, Wan Tian, Yikun Ban, Jinju Chen, Huiming Zhang, Yang Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang