arXiv Machine Learning By Shangyang Wu, Shuai Zhao, Ziyue Zhu, Jinyang Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haoran Luo

SCAD: Structured Credit Assignment and Distillation for Long-Horizon Agents

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SCAD (Structured Credit Assignment and Distillation) is a new method for training long‑horizon agents that separates planning from bounded subtask execution, distills execution locally, and refines planning credit using cross‑rollout subtask prefix trees. It gives planning full terminal credit while providing execution with positive terminal credit and teacher guidance. On all tested benchmarks, SCAD improves macro‑average accuracy by 4.48 percentage points on text tasks and 4.19 points on multimodal tasks compared to the strongest baseline.

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