arXiv AI By Ke Xu, Han Xu, Xinran Chen, Yuqian Wang, Zhixuan Li, Xiaojian Liu, Changwo Wu, Jianqiang Xia, Yuchen Li

STAMP: Provenance-Guided Credit Assignment for Deep Search Agents

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2607. 11172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for deep-search agents has largely focused on trajectory-level scoring -- outcome correctness, citation-aware rewards, and evidence coverage.

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
6d ago

Dr.Credit: Rubric-Grounded Process Credit Assignment for Deep Research Agents

Dr.Credit introduces a rubric‑grounded credit assignment method that evaluates intermediate tool turns in deep research agents by comparing the information returned to the history of accepted support for each rubric. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on ground‑truth answers, Dr.Credit uses task requirements as a shared reference, distinguishing new support from previously seen evidence and recognizing partial rubric fulfillment. Experiments on four benchmarks show that Dr.Credit outperforms open deep research baselines across all primary metrics, achieving performance competitive with proprietary models while enabling more efficient evidence acquisition and higher‑quality reports under limited turn budgets.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

VICT: Verifier-Instrumented Credit Tracing for Long-Horizon LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces VICT, a method that leverages the internal structure of verifiable tasks to perform fine‑grained credit assignment for long‑horizon LLM agents. VICT exposes executable or evidence‑backed atoms from a task’s terminal verifier and traces them back to actions via dependency‑valid proof edges, redistributing advantage only along these edges. This approach improves performance on ALFWorld and WebShop compared to outcome‑only training and matches recent fine‑grained credit methods without requiring additional critics, labels, or inference‑time verifier access.

By Pengcheng Li, Zhengyang Zhang, Dongxu Zhang, Sui Huang, Shaohua Ma
arXiv AI
Jun 6

TAPO: Tool-Aware Policy Optimization via Credit Transfer for Multimodal Search Agents

arXiv:2606. 05784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We identify and formally characterize credit misassignment as a systematic failure mode of GRPO in tool-augmented multimodal search agents: its uniform broadcast of trajectory-level advantages to all tokens causes valuable tool-use steps in failing trajectories to be penalized no differently from valueless ones.

By Chengqi Dong, Chuhuai Yue, Hang He, yandong liu, Fenghe Tang, S Kevin Zhou, Xiaohan Wang, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin
arXiv AI
Aug 26

ICA: Information-Aware Credit Assignment for Visually Grounded Long-Horizon Information-Seeking Agents

The paper introduces ICA, an evidence‑centric framework that represents information from web‑tool interactions as stable, rendered snapshots, enabling comparison across trajectories. It proposes Information‑Aware Credit Assignment, a post‑hoc reward propagation technique that estimates turn‑level utility from rollout success and assigns dense rewards to steps that provide high‑utility information. When combined with GSPO, ICA consistently improves performance on several web‑search benchmarks such as BrowseComp, GAIA, Xbench‑DS, and Seal‑0.

By Cong Pang, Xuyu Feng, Yujie Yi, Jiaqi Su, Zixuan Chen, Jiawei Hong, Tiankuo Yao, Nang Yuan, Jiapeng Luo, Lewei Lu, Xin Lou