The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.
By Liming Pu, Xiaoxia Li, Yifu Liu, Teng Cao, Bin Yang
arXiv:2608. 14642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents trained on a single reward signal exploit the gap between the designed reward and the intended behavior.
By Prabhjyot Singh, Majid Ghasemi, Mark Crowley
arXiv:2606. 17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision.
By Tongyan Fang, Siyuan Huang, Naiyu Fang, Ganlong Zhao, Zhongjin Luo, Jianbo Liu, Xiaogang Wang, Ying Dong, Hongsheng Li
arXiv:2609. 12014v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe offline reinforcement learning assumes a cost function on every transition.
By Adam Haroon, Cody Fleming
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 SAGE, a framework that selectively queries a Vision‑Language Model (VLM) teacher only when the learner is uncertain, using the teacher’s suggestions to guide training and distill them into a lightweight reinforcement learning policy. SAGE weights teacher actions by environment‑derived advantages, allowing the policy to improve beyond the imperfect VLM. Experiments on sparse‑reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks show that the learned policies can act without VLM guidance at evaluation, reduce VLM usage during training, and sometimes outperform the teacher itself.
By Matteo Merler, Giovanni Bonetta, Davide Zago, Rossella Cancelliere, Bernardo Magnini