arXiv AI
Oct 31

SCOPE: Selective Critical-Step On-Policy Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

SCOPE is a new framework for selective critical‑step on‑policy self‑distillation in agentic reinforcement learning. After a supervised warm‑up, the policy examines its own trajectories, generates hindsight skills for each step, and distills guidance only at selected error steps, using a bounded teacher‑student coefficient and a success‑relative pairwise length reward. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show consistent performance gains across multiple model backbones, with Qwen2.5‑3B achieving 97.7 % success on ALFWorld and 85.2 % on WebShop, and Qwen3‑32B reaching 99.2 % on seen tasks and 94.0 % on unseen tasks.

By Qirui Liu, Wei Cao, Yu Mi, Yichen Sun, Xuekun Zhang, Lei Liu, Yue Shen, Zhixuan Chu