arXiv Machine Learning By James E. Allchin

When Does Reward Teach State? A Hidden-Automaton Instrument and a Group-Language Warning Signal

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2607. 11953v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Does a reinforcement-learning agent that earns high reward actually learn its task's hidden state, or only a shortcut that correlates with reward?

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arXiv AI
Sep 2

Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

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