Thinking Outside the Box: Can Language Models Rely on External Guidance Selectively?
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
CAST is a critique‑aware training framework that transforms sparse task outcomes into action‑level supervision for both critique learning and policy optimization. By analyzing agent trajectories, CAST synthesizes structured rationales that explain action validity under partial observability, enabling the creation of richer training data. Fine‑tuned Qwen3‑family models trained with CAST show significant reliability gains, outperforming GPT‑OSS‑120B by over 10% on Retail tasks and improving Telehealth performance by 9% in an out‑of‑domain setting.
The paper investigates the limitations of post-training AI agents that can autonomously train large language models. It distinguishes between execution-level capability—making adjustments within a chosen training strategy—and strategy-level capability—revising the overall approach based on new evidence. Analysis of many public post-training runs shows that agents lock into a strategy early and then only perform local tweaks, regardless of task. Experiments with experience scaffolds, human guidance, and extra compute improve execution but do not enable strategy reevaluation, indicating that agents lack a mechanism to spontaneously reassess their strategy during training.
arXiv:2603. 03824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent \textit{evaluation awareness}.
Rep2Skill introduces a representation-guided framework that enables large language model agents to self-evolve their textual skills by analyzing internal representation trajectories from agent rollouts. The method identifies execution turns that deviate from successful dynamics and uses these signals, together with execution contexts, as actionable feedback for targeted skill revision. Experiments with two open-source LLMs across two agent environments demonstrate that Rep2Skill consistently outperforms purely text-based approaches, showing that incorporating internal representations can enhance agent self-improvement.
arXiv:2607. 14145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented large language model agents excel at long-horizon tasks, yet they are typically post-trained on fixed toolsets.
arXiv:2606. 26027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool use enables large language models (LLMs) to perform complex tasks, and recent agentic reinforcement learning (RL) methods show promise for enhancing model capabilities.