Curriculum RL

RL: Reinforcement Learning

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11 papers in the last four weeks, up 83% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 61

Oct 7, 2026cs.AI

Self-Evolve With a Reference:Anchored Training of Tool-Integrated Agents

Self-evolving tool-integrated agents learn from tasks and feedback generated within their own training loop. A Curriculum Agent generates tasks, while an Executor Agent learns from self-consistency signals through reinforcement learning. However, relying solely on the current Executor for feedback has two limitations: group-relative advantages vanish under full consensus, while uncertainty-based curriculum rewards favor disagreement without showing whether the generated tasks support further learning. These limitations motivate an additional reference beyond the current Executor. We propose \textit{AnchorLoop}, which introduces a frozen copy of the previous iteration's Executor as a historical reference and reuses it on both sides of the training loop. For the Executor, the anchor provides a cross-reference advantage that evaluates current outputs against both current and historical majority answers. For the Curriculum, it provides an agreement-based reference based on differences in sampled majority agreement. Since the Executor and anchor have identical parameters during Curriculum training, this comparison serves as a proxy for task selection rather than evidence of inter-version improvement or correctness. Across 13 reasoning benchmarks, AnchorLoop improves over Agent0 by 2.5% on mathematical reasoning and 2.8% on general reasoning tasks. It also maintains higher effective-advantage variance and continues improving in later iterations as the unanchored baseline shows diminishing gains. These results demonstrate the benefit of introducing a lightweight historical reference into self-evolving tool-integrated agents without external task or answer supervision.

Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao

Waseda University · Adelaide University

LLM Agent Self-Improvement Self-Evolving Agents Curriculum RL RL for Tool Use

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

Predictive Safety Curricula for Robust Legged Locomotion

Rare but consequential failures can persist in learned locomotion policies for legged robots even when average task performance is high, in part because standard curricula primarily adapt task difficulty rather than the distribution of safety-critical experience. We introduce Predictive Safety Curricula (PSC), a framework for allocating locomotion training experience using learned predictions of future safety cost. PSC trains a distributional safety critic from policy rollouts and uses its predictions to prioritize both terrain contexts and previously encountered randomized events. The resulting curriculum modifies the training distribution while leaving the task reward and policy-optimization loss unchanged. We evaluate PSC in controlled rough-terrain locomotion and in production locomotion systems. PSC improves reliability relative to standard terrain progression, advantage-based replay, and learning-progress curricula, with the largest gains on difficult terrain and under degraded observations. The same allocation principle transfers to two production locomotion stacks. On ANYmal-D hardware, PSC reduces shank-collision incidence by

63\%

relative to the learning-progress curriculum across three matched training seeds, with a reduction in every seed. On a production stair-climbing platform, PSC eliminates observed shank collisions in the evaluated hardware trials. These results show that learned predictions of future safety cost can provide an effective signal for allocating training experience toward rare failure modes and improving locomotion reliability.

Ivan Ovinnikov, Pascal Sutter, Christian Gehring +1

ANYbotics AG Zürich, Switzerland

Curriculum RL Robot Safety Terrain-Aware Robot Locomotion RL for Legged Locomotion Curriculum Learning Robust RL

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

ARISE: Adapting to Evolving Capability Gaps in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

As a long-horizon agent improves through experience, previously observed weaknesses may recede while new limitations emerge, continually changing what it still needs to learn. Yet the learning process often remains tied to a static view of these needs: fixed behavioral criteria and training priorities can become misaligned with evolving agent capabilities, while sparse task-level feedback makes such misalignment more difficult to detect. Even when capability gaps are identified, rollouts from the current policy may repeatedly reproduce the same failures rather than explore better alternatives. To address this, we introduce Adaptive Rubric-Skill Co-Evolution (ARISE), a reinforcement learning framework that uses rollout evidence to continually adapt evaluation criteria, exploration guidance, and training priorities. Rubrics evolve to reward partial behavioral progress, while their paired skills are refined and selectively activated to guide exploration toward unresolved weaknesses. Alongside this co-evolution, capability-based adaptive sampling prioritizes tasks that target behaviors needing further improvement. Experiments on two challenging long-horizon agent benchmarks, SkillsBench and Terminal-Bench, demonstrate that ARISE successfully enhances both overall task performance and training efficiency. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/ARISE .

Kun Feng, Yuchen Fang, Yiyang Tan +6

ShanghaiTech University · Ant Group

Agentic RL Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Curriculum RL Rubric-Based RL Agent Skill Learning

Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

Climbing the Hill: Prompt Injection Red-Teaming Against Frontier Models with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Prompt injection is a leading security risk for LLMs and LLM-based applications such as agents. State-of-the-art red-teaming methods for prompt injection leverage reinforcement learning (RL) to train an attacker LLM to generate effective injected prompts. However, when targeting frontier LLMs such as GPT-6-Luna, a major challenge is the cold-start problem: every attack attempt by the attacker LLM fails and thus receives zero reward, providing no signal for learning. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning-based method to address the cold-start problem. In particular, we propose to train the attacker LLM against a sequence of increasingly robust target LLMs, with each stage warm-starting from the attacker LLM obtained in the previous one. However, simply training against a weak target (e.g., GPT-4o-mini) may not sufficiently prepare the attacker LLM to obtain useful learning signals against a frontier LLM (e.g., GPT-5.6-Terra). Instead, we find that the design of the curriculum is critical: after each stage, the attacker LLM needs to partially succeed against the next target LLM such that it can learn from successful attempts to attack the new target. Our extensive evaluation shows that our method can effectively red-team frontier LLMs, achieving an attack success rate (ASR@10) of 93.8% and 45.0% against GPT-5.6-Luna and GPT-5.6-Terra on AgentDyn, whereas state-of-the-art RL methods such as RL-Hammer and PISmith achieve 0% ASR under the same setting. Moreover, we find that the attacker LLM transfers across targets, e.g., an attacker LLM trained to defeat one strong LLM (GPT-5.6-Terra) also succeeds against six other frontier LLMs (e.g., GPT-6-Luna) it was never trained on. Our code is available at https://github.com/albert-y1n/PIForge.

Chenlong Yin, Xiaolong Jin, Wei Zou +2

The Pennsylvania State University · Purdue University

Adversarial Attacks on LLMs LLM Red Teaming Curriculum RL Prompt Injection Attacks on LLMs Prompt Injection Attacks on AI Agents RL for LLM Agents

Sep 23, 2026cs.AI

Adversarial Closed-Loop Curriculum for Evolving Role-Playing Agents

Role-playing agents based on large language models have been widely applied in areas such as personalized assistance and social simulation. Recent RL methods typically train on a fixed scenario pool collected before learning begins. This creates a distributional bottleneck: as the agent improves, the scenarios where it performs poorly also change, while the training distribution remains static. Therefore, we propose AdvRole, an adversarial context rewriting framework that turns role-playing RL into a closed-loop curriculum. AdvRole alternates between an Actor that learns to role-play and a Rewriter that edits character profiles and dialogue contexts into actor-specific hard scenarios. The Rewriter is trained with a performance-gap reward, which favors rewrites that reduce the current Actor's score relative to the original scenario. As a result, the scenario pool evolves with the Actor and continuously targets under-mastered regions of the character-context space. Experiments on three role-playing benchmarks covering English and Chinese, as well as a new multilingual benchmark we release, show that AdvRole consistently outperforms baselines.

Zheng Zhang, Liu Liu, Qi Chai +4

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Tencent · Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Large Language Model-Based Role-Play Simulation Adversarial Scenario Generation Curriculum RL RL for LLM Agents

Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

Curriculum Learning with GNN-based Reinforcement Learning for Job Shop Scheduling

The job shop scheduling problem is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem, and recent reinforcement learning approaches using graph neural networks have shown promise for learning scheduling policies directly from problem instances. However, training on large instances remains computationally expensive, and generalization across instance sizes remains challenging. This paper studies curriculum learning for graph neural network-based reinforcement learning in the job shop scheduling problem by comparing it with single-size training across three target sizes: 20 x 20, 25 x 25, and 30 x 30. In the curriculum setting, the policy is first trained on smaller instances and then progressively adapted to larger target sizes, allowing scheduling behavior learned in earlier stages to support learning on larger instances. Models are evaluated on unseen instances from 8 x 8 to 30 x 30 using the optimality gap, considering both generalization across all evaluation sizes and specialization on the target size. Results show that curriculum learning consistently reduces wall-clock training time, with larger benefits as the target size increases. The strongest advantage is observed at 30 x 30, where curriculum learning reduces the mean optimality gap across all evaluation sizes by approximately 8.1 percentage points, reduces the target-size mean optimality gap by approximately 8.6 percentage points, and saves approximately 50 hours of training time.

Jayakrishnan K. Vasudevan, Jonathan Hoss, Noah Klarmann

Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences · Dept. of Industrial Engineering Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim, Germany

Reinforcement Learning Curriculum RL RL for Combinatorial Optimization Generalization in RL Job Shop Scheduling

Sep 17, 2026cs.LG

MATCH: Model-Aware Tool Learning with Curriculum Scheduling and Hierarchically Gated Rewards

Tool learning enables large language models (LLMs) to use external tools for tasks beyond parametric knowledge. Reinforcement learning can optimize tool-call behavior from feedback, but current methods still face two problems: fixed-threshold curricula can become misaligned with the policy's evolving capability boundary, and additive rewards can leak argument-level credit when the predicted tool is wrong. To address these problems, we propose MATCH, a closed-loop framework for model-aware tool learning with curriculum scheduling and hierarchically gated rewards. Model-Aware Curriculum Learning (MACL) maintains reward-derived sample difficulty that co-evolves with the policy, and each epoch selects samples near the current capability boundary together with a top-k pool of harder cases. Hierarchical Tool-call Gated Reward (HTGR) scores tool name, argument key, and argument value as a gated chain, granting credit at each level only when prerequisites hold. The same HTGR rewards drive both GRPO updates and MACL's difficulty refresh, closing the loop between policy optimization and sample scheduling. On API-Bank and BFCL V3, MATCH reaches 72.19% and 62.87% overall accuracy, outperforming the main supervised and RL-based baselines. Backbone experiments further show consistent improvements across four backbones from two model families.

Shihao Liu, Hao Yin, Lijun Liu +3

School of Cyber Security, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences · Honor Device Co., Ltd · University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Reward Modeling Curriculum RL Policy Learning Tool Use RL for Tool Use

Sep 17, 2026cs.LG

DeliveryGym: An RL Environment for Long-Horizon Embodied Agent Planning with Adaptive Curriculum

Executable environments enable LLM agents to learn from the consequences of their actions. For embodied agents, those consequences extend beyond whether the current task succeeds: completing a delivery can consume the time, energy, or money needed for later work. Learning to plan therefore requires environments that preserve these dependencies and turn them into feedback across a complete trajectory. We introduce DeliveryGym, a 3D environment for evaluating and training agents on continuous courier shifts. It couples multimodal tool interaction with persistent world dynamics and computes trajectory rewards from simulator events, making the costs of an agent's decisions available for reinforcement learning (RL). The environment also adapts future training shifts to the policy's observed weaknesses while keeping evaluation fixed. Across six models and 13 city maps, evaluation exposes a gap between reliably executing assigned deliveries and choosing and sequencing work over a shift. On the unseen-city test set, RL improves Qwen3-VL-4B's net income by 54.3%, showing that learning from complete shifts improves performance under these coupled constraints. Adapting the training environment improves evaluation income by 18% over uniform sampling at 100 updates, indicating that which situations an agent practices also matters. DeliveryGym provides an executable setting for studying how agents learn to coordinate deliveries and preserve resources for later orders within an episode.

Haoqiang Kang, Yiming Zhang, Yiyang Guo +5

UC San Diego · Independent · Johns Hopkins University +1

Long-Horizon Planning Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Curriculum RL RL for LLM Agents

Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Training prompts in online reinforcement learning (RL) differ substantially in how informative they are for the current policy: some are already saturated while others are too difficult to yield reliable learning signals, yet both receive equal rollout budget under standard training. We propose an exploration-guided prompt scaffolding framework that adapts the training prompt distribution dynamically throughout RL post-training of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Central to our approach is the

\textit{Exploration Potential Score} (EPS)

, a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility derived from KL-regularized policy improvement theory, computable directly from on-policy rollout statistics without additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, we use a teacher model to generate scaffolded rewrites that preserve the original task intent while making subsequent training more informative, reframing teacher supervision as training-data refinement rather than output imitation. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, our method consistently outperforms the baseline on both in-domain and out-of-distribution benchmarks, achieving up to 9.7% relative improvement in-domain and gains of 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Yuanhao Yue, Qianli Ma, Chengyu Wang +3

Alibaba Cloud Computing · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Fudan University +1

Multimodal Large Language Models Curriculum RL Multimodal Reasoning RL Post-Training

Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

CanvasAnneal: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer promising parallel generation capabilities but lag behind autoregressive models in complex reasoning and tool-use tasks. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently been applied to enhance DLMs, standard RL approaches suffer from an exploration bottleneck. To address this, we inject reasoning priors from a stronger teacher model to guide RL exploration. In this paper, we introduce CanvasAnneal, a curriculum-guided diffusion RL framework. During the initial RL phase, we warm-start exploration by injecting teacher-generated reasoning traces into the initial diffusion canvas. As training progresses, we gradually remove this guidance and require the model to generate more of the reasoning trajectory independently. Across mathematical reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, CanvasAnneal improves over standard diffu-GRPO on MATH500, Countdown, and Tau2 and substantially accelerates reward improvement on several tasks, while gains are task-dependent. Our results suggest that structured training-time guidance can alleviate exploration bottlenecks in diffusion RL and speed up convergence on harder tasks.

Blake Olson, Yuhang Song, Emmett McQuinn +1

Google DeepMind

RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL LLM-Guided RL RL for Diffusion Models Diffusion Language Models

Sep 8, 2026cs.RO

Actuator Dynamics Curricula for Narrow-Viability Tasks in Legged Robot Learning

Reinforcement learning has produced capable controllers across a broad range of legged-robot tasks, but a subset of these tasks fail to converge under standard training: those for which most exploration trajectories terminate before producing useful gradient signal. To address such tasks we introduce the \emph{Actuator Dynamics Curriculum}, a procedure that initializes joint stiffness at a high value and anneals it toward the system-identified value as completed episode lengths grow. Using a cart-pole system as a representative example, we show that higher closed-loop joint natural frequency under critical damping enlarges the viability kernel of the underlying Markov Decision Process, increasing the fraction of initial states from which the task is feasible. We validate the kernel monotonicity on the cart-pole and apply the curriculum to a quadrupedal-to-handstand transition on the Boston Dynamics Spot, a narrow-viability task where training under fixed identified stiffness plateaus at a policy that never completes the transition. The trained policy executes the transition in simulation across 10 seeds and transfers to hardware. More broadly, our results suggest that simulated actuator dynamics is a useful axis along which to design curricula for tasks in which exploration is bottlenecked by termination conditions rather than by reward signal.

Kousheek Chakraborty, Chandan K. Rajendra, Ayham Alharbat +1

Saxion University of Applied Sciences · University of Groningen · University of Twente

Curriculum RL RL for Legged Locomotion

Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

Elastic Horizon: Discovering the Effective Interaction Frontier in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Scaling the interaction horizon-the maximum number of environment interactions per episode-improves LLM agents on long-horizon tasks, and curriculum-based methods that progressively expand the horizon outperform fixed-horizon alternatives. However, existing schedules are open-loop: they monotonically increase the horizon until a manually specified maximum, with no mechanism to detect when further expansion stops helping. We propose the effective interaction frontier hypothesis: a dynamic boundary beyond which additional interactions yield diminishing returns while cost grows linearly. We then introduce Elastic Horizon, a closed-loop controller that tracks this boundary via the 90th percentile of successful trajectory lengths. On AppWorld and BFCL, fixed-horizon sweeps reveal clear saturation plateaus; Elastic Horizon stabilizes the horizon inside the saturation band from both under- and over-capacity initializations, attains the best success rates across 7B and 14B backbones, and saves up to 25% of per-step trajectory tokens. Our work shifts the paradigm from how to scale interaction horizons to when to stop scaling.

Gangyi Zhang, Junjie Meng, Letian Zhang +6

Qwen Business Unit of Alibaba

Agentic RL Curriculum RL Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Environment Evolution for Terminal Agents

Scaling interactive and verifiable environments is critical for training terminal agents. As frontier models become more capable, environments synthesized from scratch become less challenging and thus provide limited learning signals. Recent co-evolution methods iteratively synthesize environments near the model's learnable frontier based on weaknesses exposed during rollouts. However, their dependence on on-policy rollouts limits generalization and the continuous provision of learning signals as the model becomes stronger. In this paper, we propose environment evolution, which incrementally increases environment difficulty off-policy and schedules the evolved environments generation by generation during training to provide continuous learning signals. We derive three evolution directions that influence environment difficulty from the multi-turn learning objective and then implement evolution along these directions through a loop-engineered multi-agent harness. Quantitative rollout experiments with Hy4 preview, Claude Opus 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol show that environment evolution consistently produces more difficult environments. We validate its effectiveness on Qwen3.6-27B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B through simple long-horizon RL training, improving their performance by 14.4 and 18.0 percentage points on Terminal-Bench 2.1, respectively.

Zhiyuan Fan, Tinghao Yu, Yuanjun Cai +9

Hunyuan Team, Tencent

Terminal Agents Curriculum RL Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Scaling Large Reasoning Models beyond Human Supervision: A Path toward Superintelligence

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can substantially improve reasoning in mathematics and code, where outcomes can be checked automatically. Extending this progress to open-ended and agentic tasks remains difficult because reliable rewards are harder to obtain and direct human supervision cannot keep pace with the scale and complexity of model-generated experience. This paper studies how LRMs can continue to improve as human supervision gradually recedes from the learning loop. We examine two connected dimensions of this problem. The reward axis traces the development from per-instance human judgments to reusable verifiers and rewards that operate even without human feedback. The experience axis examines how learning can progress from human-curated tasks and environments toward self-generated curricula, constructed environments, and autonomous co-evolution. We connect these dimensions through a five-level ladder from L0 to L4 that identifies which parts of the learning process remain under continued human control. Our analysis further highlights the risks introduced by increasingly autonomous rewards and experience generation, including reward hacking, feedback drift, curriculum collapse, and environment errors. Consequently, we also provide the evaluation around three complementary objects: policy capability, feedback fidelity, and experience quality. This analysis provides a structured account of current approaches to scaling LRMs beyond human supervision and the open problems involved in developing self-sustaining learning systems toward superintelligence. Furthermore, we maintain a continuously updated GitHub repository to track the latest advances.

Zhiqin Yang, Jingwen Fu, Yuhan Liu +16

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Zhongguancun Academy · Xi’an Jiaotong University +6

Reinforcement Learning RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Language Model Self-Improvement Large Reasoning Models

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.

Yuanqiang Yu, Yanzhao Zheng, Zhentao Zhang +8

Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China

RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL Multi-Task RL LLM Post-Training Policy Learning

Aug 30, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Uncertainty: Multi-Solver Disagreement Rewards for Self-Evolving Reasoning Curricula

Self-evolving reasoning frameworks train a Challenger to generate questions exposing a Solver's weaknesses, creating adaptive curricula without human data. However, existing approaches use a single solver's sampling uncertainty as the Challenger's reward. This creates a fundamental bottleneck: as the solver grows confident on the Challenger's question distribution, all sampled answers converge identically, collapsing the reward to zero and starving the Challenger of learning signal. Critically, this single-model reward cannot distinguish genuinely easy questions from those that merely align with one solver's learned biases. We propose a multi-solver disagreement reward using a heterogeneous ensemble varying in model capacity and sampling temperature. A normalized Shannon entropy over the ensemble's per-question plurality answers explicitly rewards questions where solvers produce conflicting solutions---capturing difficulty as inter-model divergence rather than intra-model sampling variance. This richer gradient enables the Challenger to discover questions targeting true capability boundaries, producing a curriculum that forces downstream Solvers to develop robust reasoning strategies generalizing across problem types. Our approach is a drop-in reward function replacement requiring no framework modifications or additional data. Experiments with Qwen3-4B show that Solvers trained on disagreement-Challenger questions achieve +1.34 points average improvement on competition-math benchmarks (MATH-500, AMC, Olympiad), suggesting that multi-solver disagreement provides a complementary and scalable signal for curriculum generation in self-play reasoning systems.

Vinoth Selvendran, Zhanming Zhang

Independent Researcher · Palo Alto, CA, USA · New York, NY, USA

Reward Modeling RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL Reward Design for RL Algorithmic Reasoning Self-Evolving Agents

Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

Retry, Switch, or Abstain? Learning Strategy-Aware Tool-Use Policies via Controlled Error Injection

Tool-using LLM agents are commonly trained and evaluated in environments where tool calls succeed reliably, yet deployed tools can fail transiently, persistently, or silently. Robust recovery therefore requires more than repeated retries: an agent may need to retry the same path, switch to an alternative, or recognize that no viable path remains. We present BENCH2ROBUST, a framework that converts failure-free tool-use benchmarks into controlled stochastic environments with scenario-controlled solvability, where episodes explicitly require retrying, switching, or stopping after available paths are exhausted. We use BENCH2ROBUST to study two complementary interventions: structured runtime recovery context through Bayesian Tool Memory (BTM), and curriculum-controlled reinforcement learning. Across 7 models from 4 families and two multi-turn benchmark families, tool failures produce a near-universal robustness gap. On held-out Retail tasks, BTM improves robustness by up to 16.8 percentage points without retraining, while RL learns complementary recovery behavior that remains beneficial without inference-time BTM. Combining the two reaches 40.8-45.5% under injection while preserving failure-free performance. These results suggest that robust tool use benefits from combining environment-specific recovery knowledge with learned recovery behavior.

Chaoran Chen, Vy Nguyen, Ziji Zhang +7

Amazon

Curriculum RL AI Agent Benchmarks Tool Use LLM Agent Reliability RL for Tool Use

Aug 12, 2026cs.RO

IoT-Enabled Autonomous Maritime Navigation in Smart Ports: A Curriculum-Guided Shared Policy Learning Framework

As smart port infrastructures increasingly rely on autonomous maritime devices enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring reliable onboard navigation intelligence has become a critical challenge for safe and scalable operations in congested waterways. This paper investigates onboard autonomous navigation for such IoT devices under partial observability and dense traffic conditions. A curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework with a shared recurrent policy is developed to enhance temporal reasoning, deployment scalability, and robustness of edge-level decision-making. Centralized training is adopted as an offline design-time strategy, while all navigation actions are executed fully onboard, consistent with IoT edge intelligence paradigms. Extensive simulations in multiple realistic port environments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves navigation reliability, collision avoidance, and training stability compared with standard baseline methods, and generalizes effectively to previously unseen high-density scenarios. The results indicate that curriculum-guided shared learning provides a practical solution for scalable deployment of IoT-enabled autonomous maritime devices in smart port operations.

Yuqing Lin, Rangya Zhang, Kum Fai Yuen

Partially Observable RL Robot Navigation Curriculum RL Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Aug 9, 2026cs.RO

Curriculum Generation under Structured Parametric Environments for Robust Navigation Policies

Robust navigation policies for autonomous agents must generalize across continuously varying environmental conditions such as turn rates, obstacles, friction, pits, and slopes. Curriculum generation provides a principled mechanism for improving generalization by progressively adapting training environments, but designing such curricula in a sample-efficient and automated manner remains challenging. This paper proposes a reparameterized curriculum generation framework for structured continuous environment parameters using unidirectional gradient-based optimization. To improve robustness in multimodal observation spaces consisting of image-based and scalar inputs, a distribution-shift regularization objective is incorporated to encourage the learning of finer-grained latent representations. The proposed method is evaluated across two continuous-control OpenAI Gym environments: a 2D obstacle-based Car Racing variant and Bipedal Walker variant, where coupled environment parameters jointly influence policy performance. Across five random seeds, our method consistently outperforms vanilla policy training, random parameter sampling, manual curricula, frontier-based methods, Self-Paced Reinforcement Learning (SPRL), Absolute Learning Progress with Gaussian Mixture Models (ALP-GMM), and reverse curriculum learning baselines. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the reparameterized curriculum mechanism across both environments, while highlighting environment-dependent benefits of the auxiliary regularization objective.

Prishita Ray

Cornell University

Curriculum RL Robot Policy Generalization Robust RL Policy Learning

Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

CausalOPD: First-Wrong-Step Supervision for Distilling Causal Chain Reasoning

Many critical reasoning tasks, including clinical diagnosis, legal judgment, and industrial fault diagnosis, require step-dependent causal chains in which early errors propagate and correct conclusions can mask invalid reasoning. Although large language models perform well on such tasks, privacy, latency, and controllability motivate distillation into locally deployable models. Standard trajectory imitation does not correct process errors on the student's own rollout distribution. We propose CausalOPD, a curriculum online process distillation framework. A knowledge-augmented teacher first provides trajectories grounded in domain-specific causal rules, entity relations, and structural constraints. The student then generates on-policy trajectories, and the teacher identifies the first wrong step, defined as the earliest transition that verifiably violates available constraints. Starting from the verified prefix, short-horizon reinforcement learning repairs this localized failure. A causal-stage curriculum advances from evidence-level to mechanism-level and conclusion-level errors, following their propagation order. Across three domains, CausalOPD improves average path correctness by 23.4 percentage points over sequence-level online process distillation and reduces the right-label-wrong-reasoning rate from 15.7% to 4.4%. The domain-specific 8B students also surpass both evaluated proprietary references in path correctness across all domains.

Jian Zhang, Bingyi Wang, Yizhi Liu

Zhejiang University

Curriculum RL Causal Reasoning in Language Models Process Supervision Causal Reasoning On-Policy Distillation

Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

CVPO: Enhancing LLM Reinforcement Learning Reasoning via Value-Variance Adaptation and Dynamic Curriculum Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from insufficient precision in feedback on generated answer trajectories and exhibit the phenomenon of problem difficulty drift. To address these challenges, we propose CVPO - Curriculum-guided Value-Variance Policy Optimization. At the response trajectory level, we find that token-level value-variance correlates with exploration intensity. Our theoretical analysis shows this variance bounds policy update magnitude. We then use the estimated trajectory value-variance to quantify the intrinsic randomness in generation. Based on this, we design a variance-aware advantage adjustment mechanism for different reward types. At the question level, we introduce a dynamic curriculum weighting method that adapts to question difficulty. This helps the model focus on tasks matched to its current ability during each training stage. Experimental results show our method outperforms strong value-based baselines like VAPO. It achieves better performance and stronger exploration, enabling more accurate and robust reasoning in language models across various math tasks.

Ziqi Jia, Yalu Ouyang, Bo Pang +5

AI Cloud Group, Baidu · Tsinghua University · University of California, San Diego

Numerical Reasoning in Language Models RL for Language Model Reasoning Policy Optimization Curriculum RL

Aug 2, 2026cs.LG

Question Begets Question: Self-Evolving Curriculum for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning on Competition Mathematics

Teaching a language model a skill it has not mastered is obstructed by three recurring difficulties: training data is scarce, ground-truth reasoning traces are usually unavailable, and models often exhibit an apparent ceiling beyond which additional data yields no further improvement. We study these difficulties in a controlled setting, fine-tuning Qwen2.5-Math-7B on competition mathematics (AIME), a task on which it initially solves only 5.6% of problems (pass@1). To address data scarcity, we introduce Question-begets-Question (QbQ), a scalable procedure in which a teacher transforms existing problems into diverse variants that probe the same underlying skills; to model the absence of oracle reasoning, we train exclusively via reinforcement learning on problem statements and final answers, never on teacher reasoning traces. Static training on such data, however, plateaus well short of the task: real-plus-synthetic augmentation and non-curriculum QbQ generated synthetic data training cap pass@1 at 12.5% and 14.5% respectively, despite large increases in data. Our central finding is that this ceiling is not intrinsic to the model. We propose a self-evolving curriculum that, each round, evaluates the current checkpoint, seeds QbQ from the problems it can mostly get right, and trains on the resulting variants; under an identical data budget, this breaks the ceiling and lifts pass@1 to 16.5% with no sign of saturation after 20 rounds. Counterintuitively, we find that models improve when trained on variants of problems they can mostly get right, and that models trained this way go on to solve harder problems never seen during training.

Longtian Bao, Jianyou Wang, Yang Zhang +2

University of Chicago · University of California, San Diego

Synthetic Data Generation Curriculum RL RL Fine-Tuning

Jul 30, 2026cs.LG

Kalman Meets Curriculum: Efficient Dynamic Prompt Selection for Adaptive RL Finetuning

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet its effectiveness critically depends on selecting prompts of appropriate difficulty for the current policy. This is challenging because prompt difficulty evolves throughout training. Existing online methods therefore face a trade-off: evaluation-based approaches are accurate but expensive, while prediction-based approaches are efficient but typically assume stationary difficulty, making them ill-suited to RL's non-stationary training dynamics. To address these issues, we propose a Kalman-Guided Prompt Selection method (KGPS), which reformulates prompt selection as a dynamic state estimation problem rather than static difficulty prediction. KGPS models each prompt's latent success rate in logit space using a linear-Gaussian state-space model, with process noise coupled to the magnitude of policy updates so that uncertainty increases when the policy changes more substantially. A Kalman filter then maintains a calibrated Gaussian posterior over prompt difficulty, and prompts are selected by maximizing a posterior-expected training utility that favors intermediate-difficulty prompts while naturally revisiting uncertain ones. The resulting procedure is adaptive to policy drift and requires no additional rollouts beyond standard policy training. Extensive experiments across mathematics, planning, and geometry reasoning benchmarks, as well as multiple RL algorithms, show that KGPS consistently improves both final accuracy and rollout efficiency over strong baselines, establishing state-of-the-art performance among online prompt selection methods. For example, on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-7B, KGPS uses 83% fewer rollouts than DS while even improving the average performance by 0.12 point across six math reasoning benchmarks.

Haodong Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Yanjing Li +4

1Beihang University · 2Zhongguancun Academy · 3Nanyang Technological university +1

RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL RL Fine-Tuning

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

SkillRise: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Task Skill Evolution

Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learning either focus on repeated attempts of one task or use pipelines with multiple stages that entangle extraction, retrieval, and execution. We introduce SkillRise, a unified reinforcement learning framework for learning skills across tasks. SkillRise organizes related instances into progressively challenging sequences and uses a single policy to alternate between task solving and curating an evolving skill document passed directly to the next task. Decoupled credit assignment across tasks supervises solving with the current task outcome and curation with discounted downstream outcomes. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld show that SkillRise achieves the strongest Pass@1 performance among the compared methods, with gains over the strongest baseline ranging from 2.3 to 8.5 percentage points. Although trained across distinct tasks, its learned curation policy remains effective for repeated attempts on the same task. Further analysis reveals scaling at test time across tasks: performance improves with longer sequences of related tasks even when each task is attempted only once. This trend suggests that SkillRise reuses transferable skills across tasks rather than benefiting from repeated sampling of the same task. SkillRise further retains strong performance while substantially reducing the runtime overhead of skill learning pipelines with multiple stages. Together, these results provide a simple and efficient training paradigm for LLM agents to extract, refine, and reuse transferable skills across tasks.

Zhiyuan Yao, Yuxin Chen, Zhengxi Lu +13

1Zhejiang University · 2National University of Singapore · 3Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1

Agentic RL Curriculum RL LLM Agent Skill Learning Transfer Learning Multi-Task RL

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

DHRCL:Training Code LLMs with Dense Hierarchical Rewards and Curriculum Learning

Reinforcement learning is a natural post-training paradigm for code-oriented large language models because generated programs can be evaluated through parsing, execution, unit tests, and structural analysis. However, existing methods often rely on sparse outcome rewards or statically combine heterogeneous dense signals, even though syntax validity, executability, functional correctness, and structural organization describe different and progressively dependent programming capabilities. We propose DHRCL, a reinforcement learning framework with Dense Hierarchical Rewards and Curriculum Learning. DHRCL decomposes feedback into syntax validation, execution success, unit-test pass rate, and AST-based structural similarity, and organizes these signals through a three-stage Syntax, Execution, Pass & Structural curriculum. Stage duration is determined automatically from recent validation trends rather than manually specified capability thresholds. We further introduce stage-aware probability-based token credit redistribution. The mechanism follows a consolidation-to-refinement principle: it emphasizes established token patterns during syntax-oriented optimization, applies uniform propagation for non-local execution feedback, and allocates more credit or blame to less-established token decisions during final functional optimization. Under a unified Qwen3-8B and KodCode protocol, the experiments compare DHRCL with binary, pass-rate, reward-model-based, and verifiable dense-reward baselines. We further evaluate DHRCL across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-14B backbones, showing that its advantage remains consistent as model capacity increases.

Shuhang Wang, Ziming Li, Hui Cheng

RL for Code Generation Reinforcement Learning Credit Assignment in RL Dense Reward RL Curriculum RL Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

SCOUT: Per-Context Reset Curricula for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning often fails because rollouts from the unassisted evaluation start rarely reach later task stages. Reset curricula address this by starting some training rollouts from easier intermediate states, called scaffolds. Such a curriculum faces two decisions: scaffold access, obtaining informative starts, and scaffold allocation, deciding how quickly that assistance is removed. Most prior curricula pace removal on one shared schedule, which can fail when task instances, or contexts, learn at different rates. We introduce SCOUT, an online, learner-agnostic reset controller that gives every context its own curriculum. Using only binary rollout success, SCOUT removes assistance after sustained success, restores it after failure, and cautiously tests a harder start when progress stalls, without changing the reward, optimizer, or learner. A counting construction shows that synchronized global pacing can be insufficient when contexts need conflicting amounts of assisted practice. Across six navigation and manipulation settings, scaffold access improves learning and enables success in three where unassisted training fails within the reported budget. In a constructed pacing conflict, each tested global schedule leaves one group unsolved, while SCOUT solves both. Average success can conceal this failure, so we also report the least successful group. Group-level pacing works when learning differences follow known groups but can fail when they occur within one group. SCOUT needs no group labels and remains consistently strong in both cases. A reset curriculum should remove assistance at the scale where learning progress differs.

Siddharth Aphale, Ayushman Singh

Stanford University · Sesame AI

Curriculum RL Curriculum Learning Sparse-Reward RL

Jul 27, 2026cs.RO

WARL: Wrench-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Task-Agnostic Learning in Legged Robots

While reinforcement learning for legged robots has achieved high motor performance, it has been constrained by the limited exploration capability of actions confined to the joint space. To address this issue, this study proposes a new method, Wrench-Augmented Reinforcement Learning (WARL), which introduces a wrenche (force and torque) into the action space. The proposed method combines wrench-guided exploration with a success rate-based curriculum mechanism to expand exploration capabilities in the early stages of learning, with the ultimate goal of acquiring behaviors based solely on joint control. Experiments using a quadruped robot demonstrated that WARL can learn robustly across diverse terrains and motor tasks without requiring terrain-specific reward adjustments or complex curriculum designs. Furthermore, an ablation study verified the effectiveness of the Switching Curriculum, which gradually eliminates the wrench. On the other hand, we also show that introducing a wrench can encourage behaviors that do not sufficiently exploit the robot's physical embodiment. These findings suggest that while wrench-based exploration enhancement is effective for improving learning efficiency, designing it in a way that is consistent with the robot's physical structure is a critical future challenge.

Keita Yoneda, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kei Okada

Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8656, Japan. · AI Center, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan.

Curriculum RL RL Exploration RL for Legged Locomotion Robust RL Robot Learning

Jul 26, 2026cs.AI

Offline-Online Curriculum RL for Multimodal Reasoning

Multimodal large language models exhibit capabilities on reasoning tasks, yet often produce flawed intermediate steps while yielding correct final answers. This behavior undermines interpretability and reliability, suggesting reliance on spurious shortcuts rather than faithful reasoning. Although efforts have explored step-level supervision, distinguishing decisive steps from redundant ones remains challenging. We propose

O^2

-CritiCuRL, a novel curriculum reinforcement learning framework that introduces critical-step awareness through an iterative offline-online paradigm. In the offline stage,

O^2

-CritiCuRL conducts multi-rollout analysis over step-annotated trajectories to estimate step-level importance, allowing the framework to distill critical reasoning steps and filter out redundant ones. In the online stage, we employ a progressive step-level reinforcement learning strategy, where truncated chains guide the model to infer missing steps and refine its reasoning, thereby sharpening its focus on critical steps and overcoming the limitations of static supervision. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while delivering superior training and inference efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/kk0013/CritiCuRL.

Wendi Deng, Hang Du, Guoshun Nan +11

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China. · BUPT Shenzhen Institute, ShenZhen, 518038, China. · Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. +4

Reinforcement Learning RL for Language Model Reasoning Curriculum RL Multimodal Reasoning Multimodal CoT Reasoning

Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

Compete Then Collaborate: Frontier AI Teachers Build a Verifiable Curriculum to Improve a Coding Student Beyond Imitation

Large language models increasingly serve as teachers generating training data for smaller students. Prior multi-teacher knowledge distillation methods merge outputs without determining which frontier model teaches best, often relying on an LLM judge biased toward its own outputs. We introduce a compete-then-collaborate framework where four frontier AI teachers (Claude, Codex-GPT, Grok, Gemini) are ranked head-to-head by an execution-based judge (unit tests and stdin-stdout checks) with fairness controls, and then collaborate to build a verifiable curriculum for a student (Qwen2.5-Coder). We report three findings. (1) Under execution verification, all teachers solve standard problems near-perfectly after self-correction (99-100%) due to a saturation effect, but harder competition problems separate them (Gemini 77% > Claude 69% = Codex 69% > Grok 50%); however, the robust student-side results do not depend on teacher ranking. (2) Imitation (SFT) on verified solutions does not improve, and can degrade, an already-competent student at 7B and 32B (e.g., from 76.7% to 72.7% on MBPP-test, and 5.9% to 2.9% on competition problems). (3) Using the same collaborative curriculum as a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) environment improves the student (from 5.9% to 8.8% peak on competition problems, a +49% relative gain), reversing SFT's direction. The value of AI-teacher collaboration lies not in pooling answers to imitate, but in jointly constructing a verifiable environment where the student learns by doing. We release a reproducible on-prem pipeline (NVIDIA GB10) with framework patches for running GRPO on a bleeding-edge stack.

Miseong Shawn Kim

Genesis Cortex AI Inc.

Code Generation Curriculum RL Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation

Jul 9, 2026cs.LG

Open-ended Multi-agent Autocurricula via Visual Inspection of Policies with Multi-modal LLMs

Open-ended curricula in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aim to train generally-capable agents by identifying tasks that facilitate learning increasingly complex skills. A major challenge when designing such curricula is assessing task difficulty relative to the agent's current learning progress. While previous work has explored using scalar task scores or textual summaries of the agent's behavior, here we study a different approach: directly inspecting policy behavior via recorded episode videos. We introduce a simple yet effective instantiation of this approach which leverages a Video Language Model (VLM) to both process these videos and provide curriculum recommendations, which we call Visual Inspection of Policies (VIP). Since videos can naturally contain any number of controllable agents, we empirically study VIP on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). We show that even with a lightweight and openly accessible VLM (VideoLLaMa2-7B), VIP can use policy videos to generate more effective curricula than both its text-only ablation and methods that rely on scalar task scores.

Lorenzo Pantè, Andrea Fanti, Roberto Capobianco

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy · Sony AI, Zurich, Switzerland

Game-Playing Agents Curriculum RL LLM-Guided RL Curriculum Learning Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning