Jun 29, 2026 · cs.MAJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Abhijnan Nath, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
Situated Grounding and Natural Language (SIGNAL) Lab Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO 80523 USA
What does it mean for a language agent to be adaptive? Effective multi-turn agents must decide what information to seek, how to use new evidence, and when they are certain enough to act. We introduce Epistemic Decision Processes (EDPs), a belief-state formulation of multi-turn information seeking in which actions produce external observations that update the agent's posterior over a latent task variable. EDPs make epistemic adaptivity explicit: good policies choose actions that are useful under the current belief, not merely those that correlate with eventual success. We prove that belief-agnostic policies can suffer errors that compound exponentially over the horizon, and that aggregate trajectory returns can fail to identify the per-turn Bayesian advantage needed for epistemic credit. We then introduce ECHO (Epistemic Credit for History-Conditioned Optimization), a practical clipped policy-gradient objective that assigns turn-level credit using posterior-sensitive rewards. In the Clue Selector Game, a novel controlled evidence-seeking benchmark, we show that ECHO substantially improves resolution, information gain, and efficiency over trajectory-level GRPO, and matches or exceeds frontier baselines on epistemic metrics such as grounding, recovery, and calibration while producing almost no visible reasoning text.