Abstract:Embodied navigation agents built upon large reasoning models (LRMs) can handle complex, multimodal environmental input and perform grounded reasoning per step to improve sequential decision-making for long-horizon tasks. However, a critical question remains: \textit{how can the reasoning capabilities of LRMs be harnessed intelligently and efficiently for long-horizon navigation tasks?} In simple scenes, agents are expected to act reflexively, while in complex ones they should engage in deliberate reasoning before acting.To achieve this, we introduce \textbf{H}ybr\textbf{i}d \textbf{R}eas\textbf{O}ning \textbf{Nav}igation (\textbf{HiRO-Nav}) agent, the first kind of agent capable of adaptively determining whether to perform thinking at every step based on its own action entropy. Specifically, by examining how the agent's action entropy evolves over the navigation trajectories, we observed that only a small fraction of actions exhibit high entropy, and these actions often steer the agent toward novel scenes or critical objects. Furthermore, studying the relationship between action entropy and task completion (i.e., Q-value) reveals that improving high-entropy actions contributes more positively to task success.Hence, we propose a tailored training pipeline comprising hybrid supervised fine-tuning as a cold start, followed by online reinforcement learning with the proposed hybrid reasoning strategy to explicitly activate reasoning only for high-entropy actions, significantly reducing computational overhead while improving decision quality. Extensive experiments on the \textsc{CHORES}-$\mathbb{S}$ ObjectNav benchmark showcases that HiRO-Nav achieves a better trade-off between success rates and token efficiency than both dense-thinking and no-thinking baselines.
Abstract:Autonomous mobile GUI agents have attracted increasing attention along with the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods still suffer from inefficient learning from failed trajectories and ambiguous credit assignment under sparse rewards for long-horizon GUI tasks. To that end, we propose UI-Voyager, a novel two-stage self-evolving mobile GUI agent. In the first stage, we employ Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT), which enables the continuous co-evolution of data and models in a fully autonomous loop. The second stage introduces Group Relative Self-Distillation (GRSD), which identifies critical fork points in group rollouts and constructs dense step-level supervision from successful trajectories to correct failed ones. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld show that our 4B model achieves an 81.0% Pass@1 success rate, outperforming numerous recent baselines and exceeding human-level performance. Ablation and case studies further verify the effectiveness of GRSD. Our method represents a significant leap toward efficient, self-evolving, and high-performance mobile GUI automation without expensive manual data annotation.
Abstract:While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance performance via multi-turn reinforcement learning. However, they suffer from delayed propagation in sparse outcome rewards and unreliable credit assignment with potentially overly fine-grained and unfocused turnlevel process rewards. In this paper, we propose (HISR) exploiting Hindsight Information to modulate Segmental process Rewards, which closely aligns rewards with sub-goals and underscores significant segments to enhance the reliability of credit assignment. Specifically, a segment-level process RM is presented to assign rewards for each sub-goal in the task, avoiding excessively granular allocation to turns. To emphasize significant segments in the trajectory, a hindsight model is devised to reflect the preference of performing a certain action after knowing the trajectory outcome. With this characteristic, we design the ratios of sequence likelihoods between hindsight and policy model to measure action importance. The ratios are subsequently employed to aggregate segment importance scores, which in turn modulate segmental process rewards, enhancing credit assignment reliability. Extensive experimental results on three publicly benchmarks demonstrate the validity of our method.
Abstract:Existing Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle in interactive environments requiring long-horizon planning, primarily due to compounding errors when simulating future states. To address this, we propose ProAct, a framework that enables agents to internalize accurate lookahead reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm. First, we introduce Grounded LookAhead Distillation (GLAD), where the agent undergoes supervised fine-tuning on trajectories derived from environment-based search. By compressing complex search trees into concise, causal reasoning chains, the agent learns the logic of foresight without the computational overhead of inference-time search. Second, to further refine decision accuracy, we propose the Monte-Carlo Critic (MC-Critic), a plug-and-play auxiliary value estimator designed to enhance policy-gradient algorithms like PPO and GRPO. By leveraging lightweight environment rollouts to calibrate value estimates, MC-Critic provides a low-variance signal that facilitates stable policy optimization without relying on expensive model-based value approximation. Experiments on both stochastic (e.g., 2048) and deterministic (e.g., Sokoban) environments demonstrate that ProAct significantly improves planning accuracy. Notably, a 4B parameter model trained with ProAct outperforms all open-source baselines and rivals state-of-the-art closed-source models, while demonstrating robust generalization to unseen environments. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/GreatX3/ProAct
Abstract:It remains a critical challenge to adapt policies across domains with mismatched dynamics in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study cross-domain offline RL, where an offline dataset from another similar source domain can be accessed to enhance policy learning upon a target domain dataset. Directly merging the two datasets may lead to suboptimal performance due to potential dynamics mismatches. Existing approaches typically mitigate this issue through source domain transition filtering or reward modification, which, however, may lead to insufficient exploitation of the valuable source domain data. Instead, we propose to modify the source domain data into the target domain data. To that end, we leverage an inverse policy model and a reward model to correct the actions and rewards of source transitions, explicitly achieving alignment with the target dynamics. Since limited data may result in inaccurate model training, we further employ a forward dynamics model to retain corrected samples that better match the target dynamics than the original transitions. Consequently, we propose the Selective Transition Correction (STC) algorithm, which enables reliable usage of source domain data for policy adaptation. Experiments on various environments with dynamics shifts demonstrate that STC achieves superior performance against existing baselines.
Abstract:The estimation of individual treatment effects (ITE) focuses on predicting the outcome changes that result from a change in treatment. A fundamental challenge in observational data is that while we need to infer outcome differences under alternative treatments, we can only observe each individual's outcome under a single treatment. Existing approaches address this limitation either by training with inferred pseudo-outcomes or by creating matched instance pairs. However, recent work has largely overlooked the potential impact of post-treatment variables on the outcome. This oversight prevents existing methods from fully capturing outcome variability, resulting in increased variance in counterfactual predictions. This paper introduces Pseudo-outcome Imputation with Post-treatment Variables for Counterfactual Regression (PIPCFR), a novel approach that incorporates post-treatment variables to improve pseudo-outcome imputation. We analyze the challenges inherent in utilizing post-treatment variables and establish a novel theoretical bound for ITE risk that explicitly connects post-treatment variables to ITE estimation accuracy. Unlike existing methods that ignore these variables or impose restrictive assumptions, PIPCFR learns effective representations that preserve informative components while mitigating bias. Empirical evaluations on both real-world and simulated datasets demonstrate that PIPCFR achieves significantly lower ITE errors compared to existing methods.
Abstract:Long-term training of large language models (LLMs) requires maintaining stable exploration to prevent the model from collapsing into sub-optimal behaviors. Entropy is crucial in this context, as it controls exploration and helps avoid premature convergence to sub-optimal solutions. However, existing reinforcement learning methods struggle to maintain an appropriate level of entropy, as the training process involves a mix of positive and negative samples, each affecting entropy in different ways across steps. To address this, we propose Entropy stablilization via Proportional-Integral Control (EntroPIC), a novel method that adaptively adjusts the influence of positive and negative samples by dynamically tuning their loss coefficients. This approach stabilizes entropy throughout training, ensuring efficient exploration and steady progress. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for both on-policy and off-policy learning settings, demonstrating that EntroPIC is effective at controlling entropy in large-scale LLM training. Experimental results show that our method successfully maintains desired entropy levels, enabling stable and optimal RL training for LLMs.




Abstract:Large transformer models, trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated impressive few-shot performance on previously unseen tasks without requiring parameter updates. This capability has also been explored in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents interact with the environment to retrieve context and maximize cumulative rewards, showcasing strong adaptability in complex settings. However, in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents must coordinate toward a shared goal, decentralized policy deployment can lead to mismatches in task alignment and reward assignment, limiting the efficiency of policy adaptation. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval (MAICC), a novel approach designed to enhance coordination by fast adaptation. Our method involves training a centralized embedding model to capture fine-grained trajectory representations, followed by decentralized models that approximate the centralized one to obtain team-level task information. Based on the learned embeddings, relevant trajectories are retrieved as context, which, combined with the agents' current sub-trajectories, inform decision-making. During decentralized execution, we introduce a novel memory mechanism that effectively balances test-time online data with offline memory. Based on the constructed memory, we propose a hybrid utility score that incorporates both individual- and team-level returns, ensuring credit assignment across agents. Extensive experiments on cooperative MARL benchmarks, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF) and SMAC (v1/v2), show that MAICC enables faster adaptation to unseen tasks compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/MAICC.
Abstract:Minecraft, as an open-world virtual interactive environment, has become a prominent platform for research on agent decision-making and execution. Existing works primarily adopt a single Large Language Model (LLM) agent to complete various in-game tasks. However, for complex tasks requiring lengthy sequences of actions, single-agent approaches often face challenges related to inefficiency and limited fault tolerance. Despite these issues, research on multi-agent collaboration remains scarce. In this paper, we propose CausalMACE, a holistic causality planning framework designed to enhance multi-agent systems, in which we incorporate causality to manage dependencies among subtasks. Technically, our proposed framework introduces two modules: an overarching task graph for global task planning and a causality-based module for dependency management, where inherent rules are adopted to perform causal intervention. Experimental results demonstrate our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-agent cooperative tasks of Minecraft.




Abstract:Masked prediction has emerged as a promising pretraining paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to its versatile masking schemes, enabling flexible inference across various downstream tasks with a unified model. Despite the versatility of masked prediction, it remains unclear how to balance the learning of skills at different levels of complexity. To address this, we propose CurrMask, a curriculum masking pretraining paradigm for sequential decision making. Motivated by how humans learn by organizing knowledge in a curriculum, CurrMask adjusts its masking scheme during pretraining for learning versatile skills. Through extensive experiments, we show that CurrMask exhibits superior zero-shot performance on skill prompting tasks, goal-conditioned planning tasks, and competitive finetuning performance on offline RL tasks. Additionally, our analysis of training dynamics reveals that CurrMask gradually acquires skills of varying complexity by dynamically adjusting its masking scheme.