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AgentOPSD: Recursive Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

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TL;DR - AgentOPSD is a critic-free method for turn-level credit assignment in agentic RL, converting sparse outcome rewards into per-turn credit via recursive Bayesian belief updates. It matters because long-horizon multi-turn agent training struggles to identify which few decisions actually determined success.

  • Aggregates token-level teacher-student log-probability gaps into turn-level evidence, then recursively updates a Bayesian belief state in log-odds space to reweight turns.
  • Pivotal turns are identified through marginal belief revision between consecutive states; the scheme plugs into standard policy optimization with no extra critic and no extra rollouts.
  • Evaluated on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA with Qwen2.5 at 3B and 7B; beats GRPO and strong self-distillation baselines, reaching 89.1% success on ALFWorld with Qwen2.5-7B.
  • Ablations credit the gains specifically to turn-level aggregation and history-dependent recursive belief updates, rather than denser supervision alone.

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AgentOPSD: Recursive Self-Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv cs.AI Zi-Han Wang, Zhengxi Lu, Zhiyuan Yao, Jinyang Wu, Jie Wu, Zhengzhou Cai, Yueqing Sun, Ziang Ye, Linji Hao, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Yongliang Shen, Yujiu Yang 2026-08-06 arXiv:2608.05987
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 101
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 101 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-03 14:31:23.258333 UTC

TL;DR - AgentOPSD is a critic-free method for turn-level credit assignment in agentic RL, converting sparse outcome rewards into per-turn credit via recursive Bayesian belief updates. It matters because long-horizon multi-turn agent training struggles to identify which few decisions actually determined success.

  • Aggregates token-level teacher-student log-probability gaps into turn-level evidence, then recursively updates a Bayesian belief state in log-odds space to reweight turns.
  • Pivotal turns are identified through marginal belief revision between consecutive states; the scheme plugs into standard policy optimization with no extra critic and no extra rollouts.
  • Evaluated on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-QA with Qwen2.5 at 3B and 7B; beats GRPO and strong self-distillation baselines, reaching 89.1% success on ALFWorld with Qwen2.5-7B.
  • Ablations credit the gains specifically to turn-level aggregation and history-dependent recursive belief updates, rather than denser supervision alone.
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