The demand for personalized LLMs is shifting from style imitation toward content quality. We investigate whether self-distillation can bridge this gap in existing fine-tuning paradigm. To address this limitation, we introduce MIRROR(Meta- personalization by Internalizing Reference-Revealed On-policy Reflections), a novel self-distillation framework that shifts LLM personalization from imitation toward preference internalization. First, we replace reference-token imitation with reference-revealed on-policy self-distillation, aligning the model's next-token distributions along its own generation trajectories with those of its reference-conditioned self, thereby internalizing user preferences rather than reproducing reference wording.Second, we introduce MIRROR-F, a focal plug-in that augments on-policy distributional alignment with selective supervision over informative reference tokens, thereby strengthening content generation while preserving user-specific expression. Across three personalized generation benchmarks, two model scales, and complementary reference-based and LLM-based evaluations, MIRROR and MIRROR-F achieve leading overall personalization performance and superior text quality, while exhibiting less catastrophic forgetting than SFT-based baselines on three unseen personalized generation tasks. The gains are consistent across model scales and application scenarios, translating to improved performance in LLM personalization tasks.
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The demand for personalized LLMs is shifting from style imitation toward content quality. We investigate whether self-distillation can bridge this gap in existing fine-tuning paradigm. To address this limitation, we introduce MIRROR(Meta- personalization by Internalizing Reference-Revealed On-policy Reflections), a novel self-distillation framework that shifts LLM personalization from imitation toward preference internalization. First, we replace reference-token imitation with reference-revealed on-policy self-distillation, aligning the model's next-token distributions along its own generation trajectories with those of its reference-conditioned self, thereby internalizing user preferences rather than reproducing reference wording.Second, we introduce MIRROR-F, a focal plug-in that augments on-policy distributional alignment with selective supervision over informative reference tokens, thereby strengthening content generation while preserving user-specific expression. Across three personalized generation benchmarks, two model scales, and complementary reference-based and LLM-based evaluations, MIRROR and MIRROR-F achieve leading overall personalization performance and superior text quality, while exhibiting less catastrophic forgetting than SFT-based baselines on three unseen personalized generation tasks. The gains are consistent across model scales and application scenarios, translating to improved performance in LLM personalization tasks.
Policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have produced promising results for autonomous cyber defense; however, they are sample-inefficient in settings where defenders must respond under delayed, partial observations with actions from large action spaces. While large language models (LLMs) may reason semantically about security state space, high latency and trust assumptions prevent attractive in-line deployment models. We introduce Ask the Expert, a training-time guidance framework which first summarizes hard cyber-defense states, then intermittently queries an LLM for host-level defensive recommendations via a constrained action interface, and finally transforms those recommendations into tiered reward shaping for use with PPO. Because the LLM is discarded after training, deployment is a pure RL policy. Across TTCP CAGE CC1 and CC2 and both attacker types, this asymmetric design improves sample efficiency over PPO and outperforms the evaluated potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) baselines, while retaining the strongest terminal mean and requiring no LLM dependency at deployment time.
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Policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have produced promising results for autonomous cyber defense; however, they are sample-inefficient in settings where defenders must respond under delayed, partial observations with actions from large action spaces. While large language models (LLMs) may reason semantically about security state space, high latency and trust assumptions prevent attractive in-line deployment models. We introduce Ask the Expert, a training-time guidance framework which first summarizes hard cyber-defense states, then intermittently queries an LLM for host-level defensive recommendations via a constrained action interface, and finally transforms those recommendations into tiered reward shaping for use with PPO. Because the LLM is discarded after training, deployment is a pure RL policy. Across TTCP CAGE CC1 and CC2 and both attacker types, this asymmetric design improves sample efficiency over PPO and outperforms the evaluated potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) baselines, while retaining the strongest terminal mean and requiring no LLM dependency at deployment time.
Recent methods have made promising progress in generating interactions between two humanoids, largely relying on physics-based tracking policies to convert digital reference motions into executable trajectories. However, limited tracking capabilities restrict the range of reference motions that can be successfully executed, reducing data utilization. Moreover, even successful tracking does not guarantee physically plausible responses or faithful realization of the intended interactions. In this paper, we introduce DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a Digital human Interaction Generator with a Humanoid Tracking policy. Our DIGHT first executes multiple text-conditioned interaction candidates in simulation using a fixed tracker. It then constructs physics-grounded preferences from the resulting rollouts, covering both general executability and interaction fidelity. Rather than collapsing these signals into a single scalar reward for candidate ranking, we align the pretrained generator using physics-decoupled diffusion direct preference optimization (DPO), preserving criterion-specific supervision without differentiating through the simulator. To improve executability, preference pairs are derived from tracking error, friction, and floating. Additionally, to improve interaction fidelity, we propose to incorporate force feedback from simulator as a measure of contact fidelity and construct preferences over contact occurrence, location, duration, and force magnitude. The aligned generator then supplies reference motions for fine-tuning the tracker, improving compatibility between generation and physical execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only improves the physical plausibility of generated motions but also enables more reliable and faithful humanoid interactions in simulation.
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Recent methods have made promising progress in generating interactions between two humanoids, largely relying on physics-based tracking policies to convert digital reference motions into executable trajectories. However, limited tracking capabilities restrict the range of reference motions that can be successfully executed, reducing data utilization. Moreover, even successful tracking does not guarantee physically plausible responses or faithful realization of the intended interactions. In this paper, we introduce DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a Digital human Interaction Generator with a Humanoid Tracking policy. Our DIGHT first executes multiple text-conditioned interaction candidates in simulation using a fixed tracker. It then constructs physics-grounded preferences from the resulting rollouts, covering both general executability and interaction fidelity. Rather than collapsing these signals into a single scalar reward for candidate ranking, we align the pretrained generator using physics-decoupled diffusion direct preference optimization (DPO), preserving criterion-specific supervision without differentiating through the simulator. To improve executability, preference pairs are derived from tracking error, friction, and floating. Additionally, to improve interaction fidelity, we propose to incorporate force feedback from simulator as a measure of contact fidelity and construct preferences over contact occurrence, location, duration, and force magnitude. The aligned generator then supplies reference motions for fine-tuning the tracker, improving compatibility between generation and physical execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only improves the physical plausibility of generated motions but also enables more reliable and faithful humanoid interactions in simulation.
Reinforcement learning is crucial for improving large language models' reasoning and generalization. It relies on massive rollouts whose lengths become increasingly long-tailed as context windows grow. In on-policy training, these long-tail rollouts can result in GPU bubbles, reducing system utilization and limiting RL scalability. Asynchronous or partial-rollout methods improve throughput by relaxing synchronization, but inevitably introduce stale off-policy samples (trajectories) that may hurt final accuracy. Existing approaches mainly mitigate this off-policy issue by reweighting off-policy samples during training, yet they can still leave a performance gap compared to fully on-policy training. In this work, rather than passively reweighting samples during training, we propose RollVerify, a lightweight RL framework built on partial rollout that actively verifies and repairs samples before they enter training. Specifically, it introduces an off-policy shift metric OPS, to quantify the off-policy deviation of partially generated trajectories. Guided by the OPS constraint, RollVerify performs both sequence-level and token-level verification to identify and truncate invalid suffixes of trajectories. This yields high-quality samples that protect the models' accuracy while preserving the efficiency gains of partial rollout. Experiments on mathematical and tool-assisted mathematical reasoning show that RollVerify achieves accuracy comparable to on-policy training while reducing training cost. Additional code-generation results provide preliminary evidence beyond mathematics.
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Reinforcement learning is crucial for improving large language models' reasoning and generalization. It relies on massive rollouts whose lengths become increasingly long-tailed as context windows grow. In on-policy training, these long-tail rollouts can result in GPU bubbles, reducing system utilization and limiting RL scalability. Asynchronous or partial-rollout methods improve throughput by relaxing synchronization, but inevitably introduce stale off-policy samples (trajectories) that may hurt final accuracy. Existing approaches mainly mitigate this off-policy issue by reweighting off-policy samples during training, yet they can still leave a performance gap compared to fully on-policy training. In this work, rather than passively reweighting samples during training, we propose RollVerify, a lightweight RL framework built on partial rollout that actively verifies and repairs samples before they enter training. Specifically, it introduces an off-policy shift metric OPS, to quantify the off-policy deviation of partially generated trajectories. Guided by the OPS constraint, RollVerify performs both sequence-level and token-level verification to identify and truncate invalid suffixes of trajectories. This yields high-quality samples that protect the models' accuracy while preserving the efficiency gains of partial rollout. Experiments on mathematical and tool-assisted mathematical reasoning show that RollVerify achieves accuracy comparable to on-policy training while reducing training cost. Additional code-generation results provide preliminary evidence beyond mathematics.
作者Zicheng Hu, Zhijian Zhou, Xuan Zhang, Yuchen Liu, Cheng Chen, Yuan Li, Qi Gu, Yan Feng, Hongyan Hao, Chao Qu
Asynchronous RL accelerates large language model post-training by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but trains on stale trajectories. Existing methods primarily correct token-level policy mismatch through importance-ratio control in the actor objective. We show that this policy-side correction alone is insufficient: advantage estimates also inherit mismatch from behavior-policy continuations, which we term advantage staleness. We derive exact bias and variance decompositions for a general two-channel actor update, revealing nonseparable coupling between policy-weight and advantage-estimation errors: their interaction induces multiplicative bias terms, while squared policy weights amplify advantage uncertainty in gradient variance. This motivates the hypothesis that policy- and advantage-side correction should be coordinated. We introduce Coupled Off-Policy Correction (COPC), an actor--critic method combining token-level ratio masking with two-sided clipped-ratio weighting of TD residuals for return and advantage estimation. Joint parameter sweeps across staleness levels support this hypothesis: the effect of one correction parameter depends on, and can reverse with, the other. COPC achieves the highest reported performance on tool-integrated mathematical reasoning and search, outperforming the strongest reported asynchronous baseline in each setting. It also offers a broad high-performing parameter region and improved training stability. In search, COPC remains stable throughout training, while most evaluated asynchronous baselines collapse late in training. These gains persist at 64-step policy staleness. COPC adds minimal step-time overhead over asynchronous PPO and retains a $1.7\times$ step-time speedup over synchronous PPO.
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Asynchronous RL accelerates large language model post-training by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but trains on stale trajectories. Existing methods primarily correct token-level policy mismatch through importance-ratio control in the actor objective. We show that this policy-side correction alone is insufficient: advantage estimates also inherit mismatch from behavior-policy continuations, which we term advantage staleness. We derive exact bias and variance decompositions for a general two-channel actor update, revealing nonseparable coupling between policy-weight and advantage-estimation errors: their interaction induces multiplicative bias terms, while squared policy weights amplify advantage uncertainty in gradient variance. This motivates the hypothesis that policy- and advantage-side correction should be coordinated. We introduce Coupled Off-Policy Correction (COPC), an actor--critic method combining token-level ratio masking with two-sided clipped-ratio weighting of TD residuals for return and advantage estimation. Joint parameter sweeps across staleness levels support this hypothesis: the effect of one correction parameter depends on, and can reverse with, the other. COPC achieves the highest reported performance on tool-integrated mathematical reasoning and search, outperforming the strongest reported asynchronous baseline in each setting. It also offers a broad high-performing parameter region and improved training stability. In search, COPC remains stable throughout training, while most evaluated asynchronous baselines collapse late in training. These gains persist at 64-step policy staleness. COPC adds minimal step-time overhead over asynchronous PPO and retains a $1.7\times$ step-time speedup over synchronous PPO.
Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with strong novelty incentives has seen limited success and can degrade model quality. Because verifiable rewards supervise only a narrow slice of the model's knowledge and behavior, such degradations are difficult to recover from. Instead, we decouple exploration from optimization in a framework we call Exploration-Distillation (ExpDis). We train one or more explorer policies with a novelty bonus in the reward, filter their trajectories for correctness and quality, and distill them into a separate student policy. The student policy is then trained without a novelty bonus. We repeat the above procedure for several rounds, alternating between exploration and optimization. This decoupling allows us to aggressively scale exploration without degrading the student policy. Across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two model families, ExpDis outperforms DAPO at the same wall-clock budget. Moreover, we observe improved pass@$k$ scaling, indicating that ExpDis produces models that generate more diverse correct solutions.
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Modern language models undergo reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) on top of already-trained checkpoints. A key promise of RLVR is the discovery of new reasoning strategies. In principle, a model can sample novel ideas absent from its prior training data. In practice, however, augmenting RLVR with strong novelty incentives has seen limited success and can degrade model quality. Because verifiable rewards supervise only a narrow slice of the model's knowledge and behavior, such degradations are difficult to recover from. Instead, we decouple exploration from optimization in a framework we call Exploration-Distillation (ExpDis). We train one or more explorer policies with a novelty bonus in the reward, filter their trajectories for correctness and quality, and distill them into a separate student policy. The student policy is then trained without a novelty bonus. We repeat the above procedure for several rounds, alternating between exploration and optimization. This decoupling allows us to aggressively scale exploration without degrading the student policy. Across seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks and two model families, ExpDis outperforms DAPO at the same wall-clock budget. Moreover, we observe improved pass@$k$ scaling, indicating that ExpDis produces models that generate more diverse correct solutions.
Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) every token in a rollout receives the same advantage. We ask how to make process supervision efficient: accelerating convergence and improving final quality without the cost of value networks. We propose Bag-of-Tokens Group Relative Policy Optimization (BoT-GRPO), which extends GRPO to token-level reward models through a length-invariant "bag of tokens" aggregation: it collects all token-level rewards across rollouts, weights each by the inverse of its source sequence length, and computes per-token advantages relative to weighted group statistics. BoT-GRPO is critic-free, and is a drop-in replacement wherever GRPO is used when token-level reward is available. On React front-end code generation, BoT-GRPO reaches $80%$ compile rate up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and converges faster than modern GRPO variants (GSPO, DAPO, PURE) while reaching higher final compile and VLM-judged win rates. On a second task, AIME mathematical reasoning, BoT-GRPO delivers absolute Pass@$k$ gains up to $8.1%$ over GRPO in half the steps. For both tasks we compare the algorithm's performance on reasoning vs. non-reasoning base-model families (Qwen2.5-3B, SmolLM3-3B, Phi-4-mini-reasoning). Our experiments also yield a practical recipe for the reward model itself: reward stability matters more than richness: clean, bounded, stable fine-grained signals consistently accelerate learning where noisier alternatives stall.
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Reinforcement learning is now central to eliciting reasoning in large language models, while in the popular algorithm Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) every token in a rollout receives the same advantage. We ask how to make process supervision efficient: accelerating convergence and improving final quality without the cost of value networks. We propose Bag-of-Tokens Group Relative Policy Optimization (BoT-GRPO), which extends GRPO to token-level reward models through a length-invariant "bag of tokens" aggregation: it collects all token-level rewards across rollouts, weights each by the inverse of its source sequence length, and computes per-token advantages relative to weighted group statistics. BoT-GRPO is critic-free, and is a drop-in replacement wherever GRPO is used when token-level reward is available. On React front-end code generation, BoT-GRPO reaches $80%$ compile rate up to $1.9\times$ faster than GRPO and converges faster than modern GRPO variants (GSPO, DAPO, PURE) while reaching higher final compile and VLM-judged win rates. On a second task, AIME mathematical reasoning, BoT-GRPO delivers absolute Pass@$k$ gains up to $8.1%$ over GRPO in half the steps. For both tasks we compare the algorithm's performance on reasoning vs. non-reasoning base-model families (Qwen2.5-3B, SmolLM3-3B, Phi-4-mini-reasoning). Our experiments also yield a practical recipe for the reward model itself: reward stability matters more than richness: clean, bounded, stable fine-grained signals consistently accelerate learning where noisier alternatives stall.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher along the student's own generations. Self-distillation methods further remove the need for a separate teacher model by conditioning the same policy on privileged information to serve as its own teacher. However, privileged conditioning alone does not guarantee that the resulting distillation update improves the student. Indeed, privileged information can lead the teacher to solve tasks through shortcuts unavailable to the student, producing supervision poorly matched to the student's current behavior. Consequently, even a higher-performing teacher can provide guidance that degrades student performance. To address this, we analyze how the choice of privileged teacher affects the student's update. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the teacher's local distillation update to be a positive multiple of the student's reward gradient. Our analysis suggests that the teacher should not only perform well on the task, but also provide guidance suited to the student's current capabilities. This characterization motivates a practical teacher-training surrogate that combines outcome rewards with token-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization toward the student. Based on this result, we propose Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), which jointly trains a single policy in two roles: a privileged teacher using a KL-regularized objective, and an unprivileged student using dense on-policy distillation. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, tool use, and terminal use, JOLT improves training efficiency and performance, with further gains from student rewards.
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Reinforcement Learning (RL) from outcome rewards suffers from sparse supervision, particularly on difficult, long-horizon tasks where successful trajectories are rare and costly to generate. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers an attractive alternative by providing dense token-level supervision from a stronger teacher along the student's own generations. Self-distillation methods further remove the need for a separate teacher model by conditioning the same policy on privileged information to serve as its own teacher. However, privileged conditioning alone does not guarantee that the resulting distillation update improves the student. Indeed, privileged information can lead the teacher to solve tasks through shortcuts unavailable to the student, producing supervision poorly matched to the student's current behavior. Consequently, even a higher-performing teacher can provide guidance that degrades student performance. To address this, we analyze how the choice of privileged teacher affects the student's update. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the teacher's local distillation update to be a positive multiple of the student's reward gradient. Our analysis suggests that the teacher should not only perform well on the task, but also provide guidance suited to the student's current capabilities. This characterization motivates a practical teacher-training surrogate that combines outcome rewards with token-level Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization toward the student. Based on this result, we propose Joint On-Policy Learning and Teaching (JOLT), which jointly trains a single policy in two roles: a privileged teacher using a KL-regularized objective, and an unprivileged student using dense on-policy distillation. Across mathematical reasoning, coding, tool use, and terminal use, JOLT improves training efficiency and performance, with further gains from student rewards.
作者Yuyang Zhao, Lizi Liao, Leyang Shen, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He
Large language model (LLM) agents can improve their performance by reusing knowledge distilled from past interactions. However, curating new experiences into a knowledge bank that becomes more useful as it grows remains challenging. Effective knowledge accumulation should limit redundant overlap among entries and ensure that new knowledge contributes beyond what the bank already provides. Yet training a curator with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on standalone task success can reinforce general guidance even when it duplicates existing knowledge. Therefore, we propose Knowledge Weaver, a reinforcement learning framework that trains a language model to curate reusable knowledge from agent trajectories. We couple feedback inspired by token-wise mutual information (MI) with marginal success rewards to guide knowledge accumulation. Together, these signals encourage the curator to preserve distinct information from experience and produce entries that improve task success when added to existing knowledge. Standalone success rewards also favor entries that are useful on their own. On ALFWorld and WebShop, Knowledge Weaver achieves mean success rates of 54.0% and 42.0% with k=10 retrieved entries, exceeding GRPO by 16.9 and 18.7 percentage points, respectively. Its knowledge banks also outperform the evaluated prompt-based and established banks, including human-written banks, in overall ALFWorld success rate and WebShop score with the executor frozen. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/LaoKuiZe/Knowledge-Weaver.
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Large language model (LLM) agents can improve their performance by reusing knowledge distilled from past interactions. However, curating new experiences into a knowledge bank that becomes more useful as it grows remains challenging. Effective knowledge accumulation should limit redundant overlap among entries and ensure that new knowledge contributes beyond what the bank already provides. Yet training a curator with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on standalone task success can reinforce general guidance even when it duplicates existing knowledge. Therefore, we propose Knowledge Weaver, a reinforcement learning framework that trains a language model to curate reusable knowledge from agent trajectories. We couple feedback inspired by token-wise mutual information (MI) with marginal success rewards to guide knowledge accumulation. Together, these signals encourage the curator to preserve distinct information from experience and produce entries that improve task success when added to existing knowledge. Standalone success rewards also favor entries that are useful on their own. On ALFWorld and WebShop, Knowledge Weaver achieves mean success rates of 54.0% and 42.0% with k=10 retrieved entries, exceeding GRPO by 16.9 and 18.7 percentage points, respectively. Its knowledge banks also outperform the evaluated prompt-based and established banks, including human-written banks, in overall ALFWorld success rate and WebShop score with the executor frozen. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/LaoKuiZe/Knowledge-Weaver.
As option markets grow and AI advances, agentic systems for option trading are gaining increasing attention. Language-model-based agents can reason over contextual information such as news, but option trading presents a particularly challenging decision problem: a single stock can have thousands of contracts, and the agent must decide both which contracts to trade and how to combine them. Existing approaches often sidestep this complexity by restricting the policy to a fixed strategy structure, such as a straddle, limiting their ability to switch strategies as market conditions change. We present SOTA (Stock Options Trading Agents), an agentic trading framework for structured option-strategy selection. SOTA abstracts the large option universe into strategy-level decisions while deterministic resolvers handle portfolio implementation. We develop SOTA by post-training Qwen3.8-27B with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. SOTA is evaluated on options on nine large-cap U.S. equities and SPY against rule-based and machine-learning strategy selectors in the same trading environment. Over a six-month out-of-sample period, SOTA earns an 18.3% total return with a Sharpe ratio of 1.60 and a maximum drawdown of 8.96%. We also document an asymmetric role of news: news improves frontier-teacher trajectories, but retaining news during reinforcement learning reduces out-of-sample return from 18.3% to -2.7%.
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As option markets grow and AI advances, agentic systems for option trading are gaining increasing attention. Language-model-based agents can reason over contextual information such as news, but option trading presents a particularly challenging decision problem: a single stock can have thousands of contracts, and the agent must decide both which contracts to trade and how to combine them. Existing approaches often sidestep this complexity by restricting the policy to a fixed strategy structure, such as a straddle, limiting their ability to switch strategies as market conditions change. We present SOTA (Stock Options Trading Agents), an agentic trading framework for structured option-strategy selection. SOTA abstracts the large option universe into strategy-level decisions while deterministic resolvers handle portfolio implementation. We develop SOTA by post-training Qwen3.8-27B with supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. SOTA is evaluated on options on nine large-cap U.S. equities and SPY against rule-based and machine-learning strategy selectors in the same trading environment. Over a six-month out-of-sample period, SOTA earns an 18.3% total return with a Sharpe ratio of 1.60 and a maximum drawdown of 8.96%. We also document an asymmetric role of news: news improves frontier-teacher trajectories, but retaining news during reinforcement learning reduces out-of-sample return from 18.3% to -2.7%.
作者Yilun Hao, Krishna Sayana, Isabella Ye, James S Ren, Sukhdeep Sodhi, Craig Boutilier, Chuchu Fan
Large language models are increasingly applied to tasks grounded in long, heterogeneous information sources. Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) relies on fixed similarity-based retrieval, while agentic variants adapt queries and tool use but remain largely retrieval-centric. However, in many tasks, the evidence required for a solution is not explicitly present in any single source item. Instead, it must be derived through filtering, aggregation, or computation across multiple source items. In this work, we introduce RECAST (Routing Evidence through Computation, Access, and Synthesized Tools), a learned framework that formulates evidence construction as a sequential decision process over heterogeneous retrieval and computation operations, allowing evidence to be actively derived rather than merely retrieved. A lightweight RouterLM iteratively selects and formulates primitive operations or specifies customized operations for a frozen CompilerLM to translate into executable code. Once it judges the evidence sufficient, RouterLM passes the accepted evidence to a frozen AnswerLM to produce the final solution. We train RouterLM with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Across six heterogeneous benchmark families, RECAST achieves a mean success rate of 75.6%, outperforming the strongest large-model baseline by 15.9%. Moreover, training enables the Qwen3.5-9B RouterLM to outperform a training-free Gemini 3.5 Flash RouterLM by 5.0%. On three held-out benchmarks, RECAST improves over the strongest baseline by 15.0% on average, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization across tasks and heterogeneous source representations.
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Large language models are increasingly applied to tasks grounded in long, heterogeneous information sources. Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) relies on fixed similarity-based retrieval, while agentic variants adapt queries and tool use but remain largely retrieval-centric. However, in many tasks, the evidence required for a solution is not explicitly present in any single source item. Instead, it must be derived through filtering, aggregation, or computation across multiple source items. In this work, we introduce RECAST (Routing Evidence through Computation, Access, and Synthesized Tools), a learned framework that formulates evidence construction as a sequential decision process over heterogeneous retrieval and computation operations, allowing evidence to be actively derived rather than merely retrieved. A lightweight RouterLM iteratively selects and formulates primitive operations or specifies customized operations for a frozen CompilerLM to translate into executable code. Once it judges the evidence sufficient, RouterLM passes the accepted evidence to a frozen AnswerLM to produce the final solution. We train RouterLM with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by group relative policy optimization (GRPO). Across six heterogeneous benchmark families, RECAST achieves a mean success rate of 75.6%, outperforming the strongest large-model baseline by 15.9%. Moreover, training enables the Qwen3.5-9B RouterLM to outperform a training-free Gemini 3.5 Flash RouterLM by 5.0%. On three held-out benchmarks, RECAST improves over the strongest baseline by 15.0% on average, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization across tasks and heterogeneous source representations.
Memory-augmented reinforcement learning strengthens LLM agents' ability to solve complex long-horizon tasks. Skills are one such form of memory, pairing instructions with an applicability condition over task types. However, retaining every skill indiscriminately as the policy improves lets obsolete or harmful entries accumulate and mislead the agent. We propose SkillForge, an agentic RL method that compiles and evolves the skill library through a fitness-driven skill lifecycle of trial, active, stable, and retired states, so that the skills and the model co-evolve throughout training. A pre-RL evaluation phase first uses the base model's own rollouts to pre-retire low-fitness skills, yielding a filtered library that then seeds supervised fine-tuning. Reinforcement learning takes over from this checkpoint, and at each iteration selective retirement, stabilization, and LLM-guided mutation continue to forge the skill library alongside policy optimization. Across multiple interactive agent benchmarks, SkillForge achieves the highest aggregate success rate, delivering up to 7.8% relative improvement over the strongest baseline while keeping the skill library compact throughout training. We introduce SkillFurnace, a dataset of 5k+ annotated records bundling retirement-filtered SFT trajectories, evolved skill libraries with fitness annotations, and retirement events with human-annotated failure categories to support research on skill quality and lifecycle management.
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Memory-augmented reinforcement learning strengthens LLM agents' ability to solve complex long-horizon tasks. Skills are one such form of memory, pairing instructions with an applicability condition over task types. However, retaining every skill indiscriminately as the policy improves lets obsolete or harmful entries accumulate and mislead the agent. We propose SkillForge, an agentic RL method that compiles and evolves the skill library through a fitness-driven skill lifecycle of trial, active, stable, and retired states, so that the skills and the model co-evolve throughout training. A pre-RL evaluation phase first uses the base model's own rollouts to pre-retire low-fitness skills, yielding a filtered library that then seeds supervised fine-tuning. Reinforcement learning takes over from this checkpoint, and at each iteration selective retirement, stabilization, and LLM-guided mutation continue to forge the skill library alongside policy optimization. Across multiple interactive agent benchmarks, SkillForge achieves the highest aggregate success rate, delivering up to 7.8% relative improvement over the strongest baseline while keeping the skill library compact throughout training. We introduce SkillFurnace, a dataset of 5k+ annotated records bundling retirement-filtered SFT trajectories, evolved skill libraries with fitness annotations, and retirement events with human-annotated failure categories to support research on skill quality and lifecycle management.
作者Wenyu Huang, Xinyu Hou, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Ruofei Lai, Jeff Z. Pan
Search agents enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively retrieve and use information for complex multi-hop questions. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising approach for post-training such agents, but its reliance on sparse, outcome-based supervision can make credit assignment difficult and limit learning efficiency. In this paper, we systematically investigate how intermediate supervision can improve reinforcement learning for search agents. We study a range of reward-shaping and credit-assignment strategies that provide learning signals from intermediate retrieval steps. Building on these insights, we develop a training framework that combines intermediate signals with final outcome rewards to improve learning from multi-step search trajectories. Experiments across multiple benchmarks under matched training conditions demonstrate improvements in aggregate search-agent performance and show that both the choice of intermediate signal and where its credit is assigned affect training behaviour. These findings show that reward design and credit assignment are important design dimensions for training effective search agents.
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Search agents enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to iteratively retrieve and use information for complex multi-hop questions. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising approach for post-training such agents, but its reliance on sparse, outcome-based supervision can make credit assignment difficult and limit learning efficiency. In this paper, we systematically investigate how intermediate supervision can improve reinforcement learning for search agents. We study a range of reward-shaping and credit-assignment strategies that provide learning signals from intermediate retrieval steps. Building on these insights, we develop a training framework that combines intermediate signals with final outcome rewards to improve learning from multi-step search trajectories. Experiments across multiple benchmarks under matched training conditions demonstrate improvements in aggregate search-agent performance and show that both the choice of intermediate signal and where its credit is assigned affect training behaviour. These findings show that reward design and credit assignment are important design dimensions for training effective search agents.
作者Yuxiang Xiong, Ruiyan Wang, Wenqiang Wang, Teng Hu, Songhang Shen, Bohao Feng, Hongqian Deng, Ran Yi
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve remarkable performance in video synthesis, but their iterative denoising process suffers from high inference latency. To address this, caching has emerged as an effective acceleration strategy by capitalizing on inter-step redundancy during denoising. Existing dynamic caching methods typically estimate the error that cache reuse would introduce at each denoising step (step error) to guide cache decisions, whereas our concern is how much quality loss cache reuse would cause in the final generated video (terminal error). We show that step error does not directly correspond to terminal error and that latent information helps capture their relationship, thereby informing cache decisions. Moreover, existing threshold-based methods cannot provide precise speedup control, making it difficult to meet practical requirements for user-specified acceleration targets. To address these limitations, we introduce MORCA, a cache scheduling framework trained through offline-to-online reinforcement learning to make latent-aware reuse/recompute decisions under user-specified acceleration targets. Extensive experiments on different video generation models across multiple target acceleration ratios demonstrate that MORCA achieves better generation fidelity than state-of-the-art caching methods under comparable computational budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/x10ngyx/MORCA.
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Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve remarkable performance in video synthesis, but their iterative denoising process suffers from high inference latency. To address this, caching has emerged as an effective acceleration strategy by capitalizing on inter-step redundancy during denoising. Existing dynamic caching methods typically estimate the error that cache reuse would introduce at each denoising step (step error) to guide cache decisions, whereas our concern is how much quality loss cache reuse would cause in the final generated video (terminal error). We show that step error does not directly correspond to terminal error and that latent information helps capture their relationship, thereby informing cache decisions. Moreover, existing threshold-based methods cannot provide precise speedup control, making it difficult to meet practical requirements for user-specified acceleration targets. To address these limitations, we introduce MORCA, a cache scheduling framework trained through offline-to-online reinforcement learning to make latent-aware reuse/recompute decisions under user-specified acceleration targets. Extensive experiments on different video generation models across multiple target acceleration ratios demonstrate that MORCA achieves better generation fidelity than state-of-the-art caching methods under comparable computational budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/x10ngyx/MORCA.
Given a task and an evaluator, a language model can rewrite a candidate program while a search loop decides which rewrites survive, offering a practical route to algorithm discovery. But that loop is governed by five constants set by hand: which parent to select, how hard to mutate, how to keep diversity, what to remember, and a scalar score that never says which part of the program earned it. Reinforcement learning already has an estimator for each. The obstacle is that program evolution is not usually written down as a decision process. We formalize it as a Markov decision process whose action is the modular prefix the model is conditioned on, rather than the program it emits. Credit assignment, value estimation, adaptive exploration, and experience memory can then attach to distinct components. AGAR (Algorithm Generation As RL) provides the resulting substrate: any estimator can be replaced or switched off without changing the controller, making the transfer auditable one mechanism at a time, with no gradient training of the backend model. Across 19 tasks, two backends, and three seeds under one harness, AGAR improves on the stronger of two published baselines on most tasks, with gains concentrated in the competitive-programming family. The formalization also yields a checkable reading of prior work: these systems are implicitly zero-discount, not by choice, but because fitness is exogenous to an individual rather than a return over successors, leaving a discount factor nothing to act on.
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Given a task and an evaluator, a language model can rewrite a candidate program while a search loop decides which rewrites survive, offering a practical route to algorithm discovery. But that loop is governed by five constants set by hand: which parent to select, how hard to mutate, how to keep diversity, what to remember, and a scalar score that never says which part of the program earned it. Reinforcement learning already has an estimator for each. The obstacle is that program evolution is not usually written down as a decision process. We formalize it as a Markov decision process whose action is the modular prefix the model is conditioned on, rather than the program it emits. Credit assignment, value estimation, adaptive exploration, and experience memory can then attach to distinct components. AGAR (Algorithm Generation As RL) provides the resulting substrate: any estimator can be replaced or switched off without changing the controller, making the transfer auditable one mechanism at a time, with no gradient training of the backend model. Across 19 tasks, two backends, and three seeds under one harness, AGAR improves on the stronger of two published baselines on most tasks, with gains concentrated in the competitive-programming family. The formalization also yields a checkable reading of prior work: these systems are implicitly zero-discount, not by choice, but because fitness is exogenous to an individual rather than a return over successors, leaving a discount factor nothing to act on.
作者Rabimba Karanjai, Qun Gu, Hemanth Hegadehalli Madhavarao, Wenhuan Sun, Xiaojiao Yu, Suryabhan Singh Hada, Libin N. George, Uma Kona, Richard Williamson, Linsey Pang, Prakhar Mehrotra
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) treats all constraint violations equally: a $1 budget overshoot and a $1,000 overshoot induce the same training signal. It is also susceptible to length and style bias when preference pairs come from different model families. We introduce Constraint-Margin DPO (CM-DPO), which replaces DPO's binary preference signal with a continuous margin derived from a deterministic symbolic verifier and scaled by violation severity. Hard and soft constraints are separated through a lexicographic objective, ensuring hard constraints are never traded off against preferences. To supply CM-DPO with bias-reduced training pairs, we generate preference data through procedurally generated constraint profiles (DCCG) and minimal-edit distillation from a reasoning teacher (RT-MED), within a framework we call SynPlan-R. On TravelPlanner, NaturalPlan, and out-of-distribution PlanBench, an 8B model fine-tuned with CM-DPO achieves 89.2% pass rate and 93.4% solve rate, matching multi-agent systems at 13x lower latency while outperforming GPT-4o on unseen Blocksworld by 9.2 points.
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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) treats all constraint violations equally: a $1 budget overshoot and a $1,000 overshoot induce the same training signal. It is also susceptible to length and style bias when preference pairs come from different model families. We introduce Constraint-Margin DPO (CM-DPO), which replaces DPO's binary preference signal with a continuous margin derived from a deterministic symbolic verifier and scaled by violation severity. Hard and soft constraints are separated through a lexicographic objective, ensuring hard constraints are never traded off against preferences. To supply CM-DPO with bias-reduced training pairs, we generate preference data through procedurally generated constraint profiles (DCCG) and minimal-edit distillation from a reasoning teacher (RT-MED), within a framework we call SynPlan-R. On TravelPlanner, NaturalPlan, and out-of-distribution PlanBench, an 8B model fine-tuned with CM-DPO achieves 89.2% pass rate and 93.4% solve rate, matching multi-agent systems at 13x lower latency while outperforming GPT-4o on unseen Blocksworld by 9.2 points.
作者Thushara Manjari Naduvilakandy, Hyeju Jang, Mohammad Al Hasan
Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and readiness for change. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often fail to produce cognitively coherent and clinically realistic patient behavior, especially under ethical and data-scarce clinical settings. Moreover, deploying frontier-scale LLMs in healthcare applications presents practical challenges including high computational cost, latency, privacy concerns, and limited deployability in resource-constrained environments, motivating the need for cognitively aligned small language models (SLMs). We propose a cognitively grounded framework for SUD patient dialogue generation that explicitly models and aligns latent cognitive components with patient histories and counselor questions. Our pipeline consists of two stages: cognitive component detection and cognitive component-aligned dialogue generation. To enable effective learning with smaller models, we combine knowledge distillation from high-capacity teacher models, preference optimization from human-annotations, and attention-guided reward shaping. Extensive evaluations using automatic scores like BERTScore, ROUGE, METEOR and BLEU, and LLM-as-judge hit-metrics against both human and teacher-model references show that cognitively informed fine-tuning substantially improves cognitive realization and alignment over a generic instruction-tuned baselines and mental health domain specific SLMs, with particularly strong gains for open-ended cognitive components.
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Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and readiness for change. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often fail to produce cognitively coherent and clinically realistic patient behavior, especially under ethical and data-scarce clinical settings. Moreover, deploying frontier-scale LLMs in healthcare applications presents practical challenges including high computational cost, latency, privacy concerns, and limited deployability in resource-constrained environments, motivating the need for cognitively aligned small language models (SLMs). We propose a cognitively grounded framework for SUD patient dialogue generation that explicitly models and aligns latent cognitive components with patient histories and counselor questions. Our pipeline consists of two stages: cognitive component detection and cognitive component-aligned dialogue generation. To enable effective learning with smaller models, we combine knowledge distillation from high-capacity teacher models, preference optimization from human-annotations, and attention-guided reward shaping. Extensive evaluations using automatic scores like BERTScore, ROUGE, METEOR and BLEU, and LLM-as-judge hit-metrics against both human and teacher-model references show that cognitively informed fine-tuning substantially improves cognitive realization and alignment over a generic instruction-tuned baselines and mental health domain specific SLMs, with particularly strong gains for open-ended cognitive components.
Diffusion models can generate high-quality images, yet aligning their outputs with individual user preferences remains challenging. A key bottleneck is accurately modeling diverse user preferences from limited feedback. Existing approaches often rely on labor-intensive manual preference annotations or vision-language models (VLM) to extract preference information from user interaction histories, introducing substantial annotation or computational costs that limit scalability. We propose an approach that learns personalized reward models directly from users' historical image preference pairs. First, we use an autoencoder to compress hundreds of visual attributes into 50 attribute-anchored preference dimensions and train an evaluator to score images along these dimensions. We then represent each user's preferences as a linear combination of the shared dimension scores, estimating the user-specific weights by maximizing the likelihood of their observed pairwise preferences under the Bradley-Terry model. This formulation reduces per-user adaptation to optimizing a low-dimensional weight vector, simplifying optimization and enabling data-efficient personalization from sparse feedback. The learned personalized rewards guide image generation at inference time while keeping the diffusion model frozen. Experiments on real-user preference data show that our approach achieves approximately 77% held-out pairwise preference prediction accuracy and improves the alignment of generated images with individual user preferences.
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Diffusion models can generate high-quality images, yet aligning their outputs with individual user preferences remains challenging. A key bottleneck is accurately modeling diverse user preferences from limited feedback. Existing approaches often rely on labor-intensive manual preference annotations or vision-language models (VLM) to extract preference information from user interaction histories, introducing substantial annotation or computational costs that limit scalability. We propose an approach that learns personalized reward models directly from users' historical image preference pairs. First, we use an autoencoder to compress hundreds of visual attributes into 50 attribute-anchored preference dimensions and train an evaluator to score images along these dimensions. We then represent each user's preferences as a linear combination of the shared dimension scores, estimating the user-specific weights by maximizing the likelihood of their observed pairwise preferences under the Bradley-Terry model. This formulation reduces per-user adaptation to optimizing a low-dimensional weight vector, simplifying optimization and enabling data-efficient personalization from sparse feedback. The learned personalized rewards guide image generation at inference time while keeping the diffusion model frozen. Experiments on real-user preference data show that our approach achieves approximately 77% held-out pairwise preference prediction accuracy and improves the alignment of generated images with individual user preferences.
As large language models become more powerful, self-evolving agents are able to tackle challenging tasks including AI for machine learning (AI4ML). In AI4ML, while empirical verification is available, it often requires computationally costly model training and evaluation, limiting the speed and scale of agent evolution. Yet verification efficiency remains under-explored, and frontier models provide only limited gains when used directly as idea selectors. We address this gap with specialized idea-level critic models that predict whether a proposed ML modification will improve upon the current solution, allowing agents to screen ideas and concentrate verification resources on the most promising candidates. We train the critic models through supervised fine-tuning on high-quality critiques synthesized by Gemini-3.1-Pro, followed by GRPO to further improve their predictive accuracy. Empirically, our critic models outperform Gemini-3.1-Pro in static idea evaluation, and these gains extend to agent inference, continual learning, and policy training. During inference-time evolution, they improve final solution quality under the same verification budget by selecting more promising ideas, with further gains from continual learning. During policy training, they serve as learned reward models, reserving empirical verification for uncertain cases and enabling substantially more policy updates with the same verification resources. Together, these results show that idea-level critic models help ML agents discover better solutions and learn stronger proposal policies under limited verification budgets.
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As large language models become more powerful, self-evolving agents are able to tackle challenging tasks including AI for machine learning (AI4ML). In AI4ML, while empirical verification is available, it often requires computationally costly model training and evaluation, limiting the speed and scale of agent evolution. Yet verification efficiency remains under-explored, and frontier models provide only limited gains when used directly as idea selectors. We address this gap with specialized idea-level critic models that predict whether a proposed ML modification will improve upon the current solution, allowing agents to screen ideas and concentrate verification resources on the most promising candidates. We train the critic models through supervised fine-tuning on high-quality critiques synthesized by Gemini-3.1-Pro, followed by GRPO to further improve their predictive accuracy. Empirically, our critic models outperform Gemini-3.1-Pro in static idea evaluation, and these gains extend to agent inference, continual learning, and policy training. During inference-time evolution, they improve final solution quality under the same verification budget by selecting more promising ideas, with further gains from continual learning. During policy training, they serve as learned reward models, reserving empirical verification for uncertain cases and enabling substantially more policy updates with the same verification resources. Together, these results show that idea-level critic models help ML agents discover better solutions and learn stronger proposal policies under limited verification budgets.
Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents trains one policy on trajectories generated by another: rollouts come from stale checkpoints, and the inference engine's probabilities differ from the trainer's even at identical parameters. Standard remedies either clip importance ratios, which biases the update, or, as in GRPO, sample a group of responses per prompt, which is costly when episodes are long. We propose KL-Regularized Policy Optimization (KLPO), a framework that anchors the KL regularizer at the sampler. The regularized improvement step then has a closed-form Gibbs solution, and KLPO fits its log-ratio optimality condition by least squares on the sampler's own trajectories, so the sampler probability enters through a log-ratio and no importance weights are needed. Profiling out the regression intercept replaces the intractable log-partition function with the signal's sampler mean plus a sampler-to-trainer KL divergence. For token-level policy mirror descent targets, we show that the resulting gradient can be computed from terminal returns without a critic, via sampler-centered scores or a single trajectory residual, even under stochastic tool outputs. We further prove that independent Monte Carlo estimates of the KL term keep these gradients unbiased, derive the exact KL gap of cheaper top-$K$ and binary approximations, and show that SPPO, GPO, REBEL, and BPO arise as special cases of KLPO. The result is a critic-free update that uses one rollout per prompt and requires neither a learned normalizer nor a group of responses.
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Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents trains one policy on trajectories generated by another: rollouts come from stale checkpoints, and the inference engine's probabilities differ from the trainer's even at identical parameters. Standard remedies either clip importance ratios, which biases the update, or, as in GRPO, sample a group of responses per prompt, which is costly when episodes are long. We propose KL-Regularized Policy Optimization (KLPO), a framework that anchors the KL regularizer at the sampler. The regularized improvement step then has a closed-form Gibbs solution, and KLPO fits its log-ratio optimality condition by least squares on the sampler's own trajectories, so the sampler probability enters through a log-ratio and no importance weights are needed. Profiling out the regression intercept replaces the intractable log-partition function with the signal's sampler mean plus a sampler-to-trainer KL divergence. For token-level policy mirror descent targets, we show that the resulting gradient can be computed from terminal returns without a critic, via sampler-centered scores or a single trajectory residual, even under stochastic tool outputs. We further prove that independent Monte Carlo estimates of the KL term keep these gradients unbiased, derive the exact KL gap of cheaper top-$K$ and binary approximations, and show that SPPO, GPO, REBEL, and BPO arise as special cases of KLPO. The result is a critic-free update that uses one rollout per prompt and requires neither a learned normalizer nor a group of responses.
作者Yuanzhe Li, Pengxin Wang, Yuxin Ren, Jianing Deng, Jingtong Hu, Song Wang, Jingdi Chen, Huanrui Yang
Emerging long-horizon agentic tasks require repeated model calls, worsening the inference cost of already-costly language models. While narrow agentic tasks suggest potential for aggressive model pruning without performance drop, empirical results show existing methods proposed for question answering tasks severely degrade task performance when applied to agentic models. We trace this failure to two decisions: what to prune and how to recover. For pruning, one-shot importance estimates fail to track how the pruned model adapts. For recovery, offline distillation covers only teacher prefixes, while full-trajectory on-policy distillation causes student errors to compound across turns. In this work, we propose Trajectory-Anchored Pruning (TAP), the first structural pruning framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-trained agents. TAP couples structural pruning with efficient on-policy recovery, anchoring interactions to teacher trajectories while allowing the student to generate each reasoning-action response. A frozen dense teacher supervises the student's response prefixes, addressing within-response training-inference mismatch while preventing student-induced deviations from propagating across training turns. Instead of one-shot pruning, TAP re-scores channels using gradients of the recovery objective on the recovered student, connecting iterative channel selection to the evolving policy. With 60% of FFN channels removed, TAP retains 99.2% and 88.0% of the dense 7B agents' task success rates on ALFWorld and WebShop, respectively, while reducing GPU time per successful task by approximately 22% and 17%. These results demonstrate effective structural compression of long-horizon agents under a limited recovery budget.
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Emerging long-horizon agentic tasks require repeated model calls, worsening the inference cost of already-costly language models. While narrow agentic tasks suggest potential for aggressive model pruning without performance drop, empirical results show existing methods proposed for question answering tasks severely degrade task performance when applied to agentic models. We trace this failure to two decisions: what to prune and how to recover. For pruning, one-shot importance estimates fail to track how the pruned model adapts. For recovery, offline distillation covers only teacher prefixes, while full-trajectory on-policy distillation causes student errors to compound across turns. In this work, we propose Trajectory-Anchored Pruning (TAP), the first structural pruning framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-trained agents. TAP couples structural pruning with efficient on-policy recovery, anchoring interactions to teacher trajectories while allowing the student to generate each reasoning-action response. A frozen dense teacher supervises the student's response prefixes, addressing within-response training-inference mismatch while preventing student-induced deviations from propagating across training turns. Instead of one-shot pruning, TAP re-scores channels using gradients of the recovery objective on the recovered student, connecting iterative channel selection to the evolving policy. With 60% of FFN channels removed, TAP retains 99.2% and 88.0% of the dense 7B agents' task success rates on ALFWorld and WebShop, respectively, while reducing GPU time per successful task by approximately 22% and 17%. These results demonstrate effective structural compression of long-horizon agents under a limited recovery budget.
Generative actors are transforming offline reinforcement learning (RL) by enabling expressive policy classes that model complex action distributions. However, this expressiveness also exposes a key challenge in heterogeneous datasets: generative policies can reproduce unreliable action modes whose return distributions exhibit high variance, occasionally yielding high returns by chance but lacking consistency. Consequently, maximizing the expected $Q$-value alone is insufficient for identifying reliable actions. We propose VAN-Flow (Variance-Averse $n$-step Flow), a framework that promotes reliable actions in generative offline RL. VAN-Flow combines (i) a categorical distributional critic, (ii) a variance-averse expectation operator that smoothly reweights atom probabilities to favor actions with both high returns and low dispersion, and (iii) a flow-matching generative actor guided via rejection sampling. Unlike CVaR or mean-variance objectives, the operator redistributes probability mass over the categorical return distribution without hard truncation or auxiliary penalty terms. Across more than 40 tasks from D4RL and OGBench, VAN-Flow consistently outperforms strong baselines, with the largest gains in long-horizon and high-variance regimes where reliable action selection becomes critical.
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Generative actors are transforming offline reinforcement learning (RL) by enabling expressive policy classes that model complex action distributions. However, this expressiveness also exposes a key challenge in heterogeneous datasets: generative policies can reproduce unreliable action modes whose return distributions exhibit high variance, occasionally yielding high returns by chance but lacking consistency. Consequently, maximizing the expected $Q$-value alone is insufficient for identifying reliable actions. We propose VAN-Flow (Variance-Averse $n$-step Flow), a framework that promotes reliable actions in generative offline RL. VAN-Flow combines (i) a categorical distributional critic, (ii) a variance-averse expectation operator that smoothly reweights atom probabilities to favor actions with both high returns and low dispersion, and (iii) a flow-matching generative actor guided via rejection sampling. Unlike CVaR or mean-variance objectives, the operator redistributes probability mass over the categorical return distribution without hard truncation or auxiliary penalty terms. Across more than 40 tasks from D4RL and OGBench, VAN-Flow consistently outperforms strong baselines, with the largest gains in long-horizon and high-variance regimes where reliable action selection becomes critical.
Language-based trajectory predictors represent coordinates as discrete tokens and learn auxiliary tasks such as destination and group reasoning. This formulation enables the model to capture behavioral intent and social context beyond coordinate dynamics alone. However, token-level objectives provide only indirect guidance for continuous coordinate-space dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce MoRE (Mixture of Reward Experts), a refinement framework that transfers numerical forecasting priors into a pretrained language-based predictor through reinforcement learning. Five frozen numerical predictors provide complementary coordinate-level knowledge of motion and interactions. Their predictions are converted into expert rewards and combined through an uncertainty-weighted consensus that penalizes disagreement. A ground-truth reward anchors the prediction to the target trajectory. To focus refinement on difficult cases, MoRE refines the policy using the top 1% of training samples ranked by predictive entropy. Expert predictions are computed once and cached before PPO training, so the experts are not run during policy updates or inference. In this way, MoRE combines the contextual modeling of the language-based predictor with coordinate-level feedback from numerical experts. On ETH-UCY, MoRE reduces ADE from 0.22 to 0.20 m and FDE from 0.32 to 0.29 m. Relative to the base policy, ADE decreases by 17.9% on SDD and 12.7% on NBA. On ETH-UCY, MoRE also reduces collision rates and better matches ground-truth pedestrian spacing, without increasing measured inference memory or latency. The project page is available at https://jungyu0413.github.io/MoRE/.
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Language-based trajectory predictors represent coordinates as discrete tokens and learn auxiliary tasks such as destination and group reasoning. This formulation enables the model to capture behavioral intent and social context beyond coordinate dynamics alone. However, token-level objectives provide only indirect guidance for continuous coordinate-space dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce MoRE (Mixture of Reward Experts), a refinement framework that transfers numerical forecasting priors into a pretrained language-based predictor through reinforcement learning. Five frozen numerical predictors provide complementary coordinate-level knowledge of motion and interactions. Their predictions are converted into expert rewards and combined through an uncertainty-weighted consensus that penalizes disagreement. A ground-truth reward anchors the prediction to the target trajectory. To focus refinement on difficult cases, MoRE refines the policy using the top 1% of training samples ranked by predictive entropy. Expert predictions are computed once and cached before PPO training, so the experts are not run during policy updates or inference. In this way, MoRE combines the contextual modeling of the language-based predictor with coordinate-level feedback from numerical experts. On ETH-UCY, MoRE reduces ADE from 0.22 to 0.20 m and FDE from 0.32 to 0.29 m. Relative to the base policy, ADE decreases by 17.9% on SDD and 12.7% on NBA. On ETH-UCY, MoRE also reduces collision rates and better matches ground-truth pedestrian spacing, without increasing measured inference memory or latency. The project page is available at https://jungyu0413.github.io/MoRE/.
Smart contracts written in Solidity manage assets, permissions, and irreversible state changes, making code generation both useful and security-critical. Repository-level Solidity generation is challenging because models must synthesize complete contracts or libraries while preserving consistency across state variables, modifiers, events, inheritance, external calls, and access-control logic. We present RAPO-Sol, a two-stage training framework for repository-level Solidity code generation. First, Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) augments each training input with similar Solidity examples, helping the model learn recurring contract-level patterns while remaining retrieval-free at inference time. Second, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) trains the model to prefer reference contracts over close but semantically flawed alternatives. We construct rejected samples using Solidity Semantic-Anchor Perturbation (SAP), which perturbs validation statements, visibility modifiers, data-location keywords, context variables, payment operations, and low-level calls. Experiments on SolidityBench with CodeLlama-7B-Instruct, DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B-Instruct, and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct show that RAFT consistently improves over supervised fine-tuning, while SAP-based DPO provides further gains in BLEU and SolidityScore. The full RAFT+DPO pipeline achieves the best performance across all three models, demonstrating complementary benefits from retrieval during training and Solidity-aware preference optimization without adding retrieval cost at inference.
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Smart contracts written in Solidity manage assets, permissions, and irreversible state changes, making code generation both useful and security-critical. Repository-level Solidity generation is challenging because models must synthesize complete contracts or libraries while preserving consistency across state variables, modifiers, events, inheritance, external calls, and access-control logic. We present RAPO-Sol, a two-stage training framework for repository-level Solidity code generation. First, Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) augments each training input with similar Solidity examples, helping the model learn recurring contract-level patterns while remaining retrieval-free at inference time. Second, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) trains the model to prefer reference contracts over close but semantically flawed alternatives. We construct rejected samples using Solidity Semantic-Anchor Perturbation (SAP), which perturbs validation statements, visibility modifiers, data-location keywords, context variables, payment operations, and low-level calls. Experiments on SolidityBench with CodeLlama-7B-Instruct, DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B-Instruct, and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct show that RAFT consistently improves over supervised fine-tuning, while SAP-based DPO provides further gains in BLEU and SolidityScore. The full RAFT+DPO pipeline achieves the best performance across all three models, demonstrating complementary benefits from retrieval during training and Solidity-aware preference optimization without adding retrieval cost at inference.
作者Kyudan Jung, Hyunsin Park, Yoonhyung Lee, Jinhwan Park, Jinhyeok Yang, KiHyun Nam, Jaegul Choo, Jinkyu Lee
As human--AI interactions become more conversational, full-duplex speech language models capable of natural real-time dialogue are growing in importance. Beyond generating appropriate responses, these models must coordinate turn-taking, backchanneling, and floor management in real time. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a way to refine these behaviors through direct feedback on interaction outcomes. However, existing RL methods either apply timing feedback to a token policy or optimize semantic content, leaving the joint improvement of timing and content unresolved. We introduce HiPLEX, an RL framework that factorizes a pretrained full-duplex text policy into a control policy that decides when to emit content and a conditional content policy that decides what to emit. The first factor selects among 'pad', 'epad', and 'con'. The second selects a token only when 'con' is chosen. This hierarchy describes conditional actions within each frame and uses the model's existing text head. We route timing advantages to the token-group factor through event-causal masks derived from generated speech episodes, and route an LLM-judge semantic advantage to the conditional content factor. Across three Moshi seeds on Full-Duplex-Bench v1, HiPLEX reduces takeover rates during natural user pauses and backchannel opportunities, and shortens post-interruption response latency relative to GRPO, while maintaining comparable judged interruption-response quality. On Moshi and PersonaPlex, HiPLEX better matches pooled human turn-timing and backchannel-rate marginals than GRPO.
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As human--AI interactions become more conversational, full-duplex speech language models capable of natural real-time dialogue are growing in importance. Beyond generating appropriate responses, these models must coordinate turn-taking, backchanneling, and floor management in real time. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a way to refine these behaviors through direct feedback on interaction outcomes. However, existing RL methods either apply timing feedback to a token policy or optimize semantic content, leaving the joint improvement of timing and content unresolved. We introduce HiPLEX, an RL framework that factorizes a pretrained full-duplex text policy into a control policy that decides when to emit content and a conditional content policy that decides what to emit. The first factor selects among 'pad', 'epad', and 'con'. The second selects a token only when 'con' is chosen. This hierarchy describes conditional actions within each frame and uses the model's existing text head. We route timing advantages to the token-group factor through event-causal masks derived from generated speech episodes, and route an LLM-judge semantic advantage to the conditional content factor. Across three Moshi seeds on Full-Duplex-Bench v1, HiPLEX reduces takeover rates during natural user pauses and backchannel opportunities, and shortens post-interruption response latency relative to GRPO, while maintaining comparable judged interruption-response quality. On Moshi and PersonaPlex, HiPLEX better matches pooled human turn-timing and backchannel-rate marginals than GRPO.
Model merging provides a training-free way to transfer reasoning capabilities from language models to vision-language models (VLMs), but endpoint-based transfer can conflate pre-existing model differences with changes acquired during reasoning post-training. We instead formulate capability transfer around the training-stage update, isolating the parameter changes induced by reinforcement learning (RL). Yet transferring this update in full remains suboptimal: we find that its components differ substantially in cross-model transferability, with dominant directions transferring more effectively than the complete update. Based on this finding, we introduce Selective-RL, which isolates the RL-stage update, retains its dominant matrix-wise directions with magnitude preservation, and transfers them to the language modules of a VLM. Across three model families and five visual-reasoning benchmarks, Selective-RL improves full-update interpolation in 12 of 15 comparisons, including an 8.55 percentage-point MathVision gain on the Qwen recipient. Matched controls show that update magnitude or arbitrary low rank alone does not reproduce these gains. These results highlight a distinction between what is acquired during post-training and what remains transferable across models, providing a training-stage perspective on cross-model capability transfer. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/selective-rl.
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Model merging provides a training-free way to transfer reasoning capabilities from language models to vision-language models (VLMs), but endpoint-based transfer can conflate pre-existing model differences with changes acquired during reasoning post-training. We instead formulate capability transfer around the training-stage update, isolating the parameter changes induced by reinforcement learning (RL). Yet transferring this update in full remains suboptimal: we find that its components differ substantially in cross-model transferability, with dominant directions transferring more effectively than the complete update. Based on this finding, we introduce Selective-RL, which isolates the RL-stage update, retains its dominant matrix-wise directions with magnitude preservation, and transfers them to the language modules of a VLM. Across three model families and five visual-reasoning benchmarks, Selective-RL improves full-update interpolation in 12 of 15 comparisons, including an 8.55 percentage-point MathVision gain on the Qwen recipient. Matched controls show that update magnitude or arbitrary low rank alone does not reproduce these gains. These results highlight a distinction between what is acquired during post-training and what remains transferable across models, providing a training-stage perspective on cross-model capability transfer. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/selective-rl.
作者Qi Liu, Fengming Liang, Yiqun Chen, Erhan Zhang, Jiaxin Mao
Dense retrieval models are typically trained with contrastive objectives that learn effective representations but do not directly optimize retrieval metrics or downstream task performance. To address this problem, we introduce RELER (REinforcement LEarning for Retrieval), a reinforcement learning framework that enables existing embedding models to learn to retrieve directly in embedding space and align to task-specific rewards. We train RELER by sampling unit-length query and document embedding actions from von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions centered on normalized encoder outputs, scoring the resulting retrieval or downstream outcomes as rewards, and updating the encoder with REINFORCE using a leave-one-out baseline (RLOO). As exploration in the high-dimensional embedding space is prone to sampling noise, we further propose conditional-mean projection (CMP), which projects each sampled embedding onto the low-dimensional subspace spanned by its encoder output and the candidate embeddings it is compared against, reducing noise in the policy gradient while preserving its expectation. We evaluate RELER on BRIGHT, a benchmark with reasoning-intensive queries that remain challenging for existing embedding models. RELER consistently outperforms InfoNCE and LambdaLoss in average nDCG@10 when post-training BGE-M3 and Qwen3-Embedding backbones. We further evaluate downstream utility through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where we adapt only the query encoder while keeping the document index and generator fixed. Across seven QA datasets, jointly optimizing retrieval and answer rewards improves both average retrieval performance and answer quality in RAG.
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Dense retrieval models are typically trained with contrastive objectives that learn effective representations but do not directly optimize retrieval metrics or downstream task performance. To address this problem, we introduce RELER (REinforcement LEarning for Retrieval), a reinforcement learning framework that enables existing embedding models to learn to retrieve directly in embedding space and align to task-specific rewards. We train RELER by sampling unit-length query and document embedding actions from von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions centered on normalized encoder outputs, scoring the resulting retrieval or downstream outcomes as rewards, and updating the encoder with REINFORCE using a leave-one-out baseline (RLOO). As exploration in the high-dimensional embedding space is prone to sampling noise, we further propose conditional-mean projection (CMP), which projects each sampled embedding onto the low-dimensional subspace spanned by its encoder output and the candidate embeddings it is compared against, reducing noise in the policy gradient while preserving its expectation. We evaluate RELER on BRIGHT, a benchmark with reasoning-intensive queries that remain challenging for existing embedding models. RELER consistently outperforms InfoNCE and LambdaLoss in average nDCG@10 when post-training BGE-M3 and Qwen3-Embedding backbones. We further evaluate downstream utility through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where we adapt only the query encoder while keeping the document index and generator fixed. Across seven QA datasets, jointly optimizing retrieval and answer rewards improves both average retrieval performance and answer quality in RAG.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides a natural framework for adapting pretrained models to video temporal grounding, where generated temporal intervals can be scored directly against ground truth intervals. Yet existing overlap verifiers typically score each rollout independently, leaving the joint structure of the rollout group unused. We introduce SUTURE, which conditions verification on the rollout group and exploits its structure at two complementary scales: disagreement across rollouts controls how strongly the target is reweighted, while coverage at each position determines where reward mass is redistributed. We show that the resulting verifier admits an exact decomposition into the standard IoU term and a covariance correction determined by the rollout group. A local gradient diagnostic finds a preference for responses covering relatively less supported target regions in the analyzed groups. Across five temporal grounding benchmarks, SUTURE improves grounding performance at every reported IoU threshold. Its trained policy also shows less video-start anchoring in reasoning traces: for later events, the first temporal mention more often overlaps the annotated target. Together, these results show that the joint structure of a rollout group can support a more informative temporal verifier.
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Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides a natural framework for adapting pretrained models to video temporal grounding, where generated temporal intervals can be scored directly against ground truth intervals. Yet existing overlap verifiers typically score each rollout independently, leaving the joint structure of the rollout group unused. We introduce SUTURE, which conditions verification on the rollout group and exploits its structure at two complementary scales: disagreement across rollouts controls how strongly the target is reweighted, while coverage at each position determines where reward mass is redistributed. We show that the resulting verifier admits an exact decomposition into the standard IoU term and a covariance correction determined by the rollout group. A local gradient diagnostic finds a preference for responses covering relatively less supported target regions in the analyzed groups. Across five temporal grounding benchmarks, SUTURE improves grounding performance at every reported IoU threshold. Its trained policy also shows less video-start anchoring in reasoning traces: for later events, the first temporal mention more often overlaps the annotated target. Together, these results show that the joint structure of a rollout group can support a more informative temporal verifier.
作者Jian Gao, Kailin Bi, Jiamin Xu, Jinlan Xu, Gang Xu
Large-model-based point-to-CAD generation holds immense potential for advancing industrial design and enhancing 3D modeling efficiency. However, most existing methods approach the problem as a general point-cloud encoding and token prediction task, neglecting the tokenization and supervision specifically for CAD-related primitives. As a result, these methods often struggle to accurately reconstruct the intricate primitive structures. To address this limitation, we propose PrimitiveCAD, a novel multi-stage paradigm for point-to-CAD reconstruction that enhances the geometric accuracy of generated CAD models while better preserving critical geometric features. First, we introduce a primitive-aware point cloud tokenization model, enabling the system to learn more robust geometric representations from CAD point clouds. Next, we perform supervised finetuning on a large language model (LLM) and introduce an operation alignment loss to align key CAD operation frequencies, thereby improving the preservation of global shape features. Finally, we incorporate reinforcement learning (RL) and introduce a feature-line alignment reward to further reduce stochasticity and enhance the fine-grained preservation of geometric features. Experiments on the DeepCAD and Fusion360 datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in code validity, geometric accuracy, and geometric feature preservation.
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Large-model-based point-to-CAD generation holds immense potential for advancing industrial design and enhancing 3D modeling efficiency. However, most existing methods approach the problem as a general point-cloud encoding and token prediction task, neglecting the tokenization and supervision specifically for CAD-related primitives. As a result, these methods often struggle to accurately reconstruct the intricate primitive structures. To address this limitation, we propose PrimitiveCAD, a novel multi-stage paradigm for point-to-CAD reconstruction that enhances the geometric accuracy of generated CAD models while better preserving critical geometric features. First, we introduce a primitive-aware point cloud tokenization model, enabling the system to learn more robust geometric representations from CAD point clouds. Next, we perform supervised finetuning on a large language model (LLM) and introduce an operation alignment loss to align key CAD operation frequencies, thereby improving the preservation of global shape features. Finally, we incorporate reinforcement learning (RL) and introduce a feature-line alignment reward to further reduce stochasticity and enhance the fine-grained preservation of geometric features. Experiments on the DeepCAD and Fusion360 datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in code validity, geometric accuracy, and geometric feature preservation.
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a standard reward-model-free approach for aligning language models with preference data. However, as the scaled preference margin grows during training, the logistic DPO loss becomes progressively less sensitive to further changes. We study DPO from a loss-level geometric perspective and identify the sigmoid factor as a learning signal that characterizes the local sensitivity of the objective. Based on this view, we propose Learning-Signal-Controlled Direct Preference Optimization (LSC-DPO), which dynamically regulates the learning signal near a target regime. A log-space analysis establishes conditions for stable tracking of the target learning-signal regime. Experiments on AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench, and Anthropic-HH show that LSC-DPO consistently improves over DPO and strong preference-optimization baselines. We further find that different coefficient initializations induce distinct transient learning-signal trajectories even when their later signal levels become similar. Based on this observation, we derive a signal-budget compensation rule that adjusts the target learning signal to compensate for these transient differences. The resulting compensation substantially reduces performance variation across coefficient initializations.
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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a standard reward-model-free approach for aligning language models with preference data. However, as the scaled preference margin grows during training, the logistic DPO loss becomes progressively less sensitive to further changes. We study DPO from a loss-level geometric perspective and identify the sigmoid factor as a learning signal that characterizes the local sensitivity of the objective. Based on this view, we propose Learning-Signal-Controlled Direct Preference Optimization (LSC-DPO), which dynamically regulates the learning signal near a target regime. A log-space analysis establishes conditions for stable tracking of the target learning-signal regime. Experiments on AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench, and Anthropic-HH show that LSC-DPO consistently improves over DPO and strong preference-optimization baselines. We further find that different coefficient initializations induce distinct transient learning-signal trajectories even when their later signal levels become similar. Based on this observation, we derive a signal-budget compensation rule that adjusts the target learning signal to compensate for these transient differences. The resulting compensation substantially reduces performance variation across coefficient initializations.