The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.
By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv:2607. 10891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly shifting toward agents that solve tasks through diverse interfaces, including web and graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
By Qijia Shen, Zhiqi Huang, Vamsidhar Kamanuru, Aznaur Aliev, Jay Rainton, Ahmed Awelkair, Zhichen Zeng, Jiajun Li, Shi Dong, Yueming Yuan, Boyuan Ma, Qizheng Zhang, Jiwei Fu, Yuzhen Mao, Wendong Fan, Ping Nie, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Changran Hu, Jonathan Lingjie Li, Urmish Thakker, Guohao Li
The paper "It Takes Workflows to Evolve Better Workflows" introduces FloWright, a method that uses a hierarchical, structure‑aware reward system to allow one or more roles in a multi‑agent workflow to self‑evolve without extra models or data. It also proposes DataWright, an adaptive data hardening technique that transforms existing datasets into more challenging workflow‑level tasks. Experiments on document, slide, chart, code, math, and finance tasks show that small open models trained with FloWright can improve performance by up to +7.41%, with co‑evolving multiple roles yielding the largest gains.
"whyItMatters":"The work demonstrates that optimizing beyond the workflow generator—by enabling multiple agents to co‑evolve—can substantially enhance the effectiveness of multi‑agent workflows for complex real‑world tasks."
By Xuehang Guo, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhenhailong Wang, Qingyun Wang
arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.
By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
arXiv:2606. 24855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic language models dramatically expand the applications of AI yet little is publicly known about how to curate training data for broadly capable agents.
By Negin Raoof, Richard Zhuang, Marianna Nezhurina, Etash Guha, Atula Tejaswi, Ryan Marten, Charlie F. Ruan, Tyler Griggs, Alexander Glenn Shaw, Hritik Bansal, E. Kelly Buchanan, Artem Gazizov, Reinhard Heckel, Chinmay Hegde, Sankalp Jajee, Daanish Khazi, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Xiangyi Li, Hange Liu, Shlok Natarajan, Harsh Raj, Nicholas Roberts, Ethan Shen, Nishad Singhi, Michael Siu, Ashima Suvarna, Hanwen Xing, Patrick Yubeaton, Robert Zhang, Leon Liangyu Chen, Xiaokun Chen, Steven Dillmann, Saadia Gabriel, Xunyi Jiang, Anurag Kashyap, Boxuan Li, Yein Park, Minh Pham, Sujay Sanghavi, Lin Shi, Ke Sun, Yixin Wang, Zhiwei Xu, Erica Zhang, Siyan Zhao, Wanjia Zhao, Jenia Jitsev, Alex Dimakis, Benjamin Feuer, Ludwig Schmidt
Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.