Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ji, Yuxiang, Wang, Zengbin, Wang, Yong, Yang, Shidong, Ma, Ziyu, Chen, Guanhua, Sun, Zonghua, Wu, Liaoni, Chu, Xiangxiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866909035919310848
author Ji, Yuxiang
Wang, Zengbin
Wang, Yong
Yang, Shidong
Ma, Ziyu
Chen, Guanhua
Sun, Zonghua
Wu, Liaoni
Chu, Xiangxiang
author_facet Ji, Yuxiang
Wang, Zengbin
Wang, Yong
Yang, Shidong
Ma, Ziyu
Chen, Guanhua
Sun, Zonghua
Wu, Liaoni
Chu, Xiangxiang
contents Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy cannot reach reward states, additional training or external guidance is needed to recover effective learning signals. Rather than relying on costly iterative supervised fine tuning (SFT), we exploit the abundant action data generated in everyday human interactions. We propose \textsc{ActGuide-RL}, which injects action data as plan-style reference guidance, enabling the agentic policy to overcome reachability barriers to reward states. Guided and unguided rollouts are then jointly optimized via mixed-policy training, internalizing the exploration gains back into the unguided policy. Motivated by a theoretical and empirical analysis of the benefit-risk trade-off, we adopt a minimal intervention principle that invokes guidance only as an adaptive fallback, matching task difficulty while minimizing off-policy risk. On search-agent benchmarks, \textsc{ActGuide-RL} substantially improves over zero RL (+10.7 pp on GAIA and +19 pp on XBench with Qwen3-4B), and performs on par with the SFT+RL pipeline without any cold start. This suggests a new paradigm for agentic RL that reduces the reliance on heavy SFT data by using scalable action guidance instead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance
Ji, Yuxiang
Wang, Zengbin
Wang, Yong
Yang, Shidong
Ma, Ziyu
Chen, Guanhua
Sun, Zonghua
Wu, Liaoni
Chu, Xiangxiang
Computation and Language
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy cannot reach reward states, additional training or external guidance is needed to recover effective learning signals. Rather than relying on costly iterative supervised fine tuning (SFT), we exploit the abundant action data generated in everyday human interactions. We propose \textsc{ActGuide-RL}, which injects action data as plan-style reference guidance, enabling the agentic policy to overcome reachability barriers to reward states. Guided and unguided rollouts are then jointly optimized via mixed-policy training, internalizing the exploration gains back into the unguided policy. Motivated by a theoretical and empirical analysis of the benefit-risk trade-off, we adopt a minimal intervention principle that invokes guidance only as an adaptive fallback, matching task difficulty while minimizing off-policy risk. On search-agent benchmarks, \textsc{ActGuide-RL} substantially improves over zero RL (+10.7 pp on GAIA and +19 pp on XBench with Qwen3-4B), and performs on par with the SFT+RL pipeline without any cold start. This suggests a new paradigm for agentic RL that reduces the reliance on heavy SFT data by using scalable action guidance instead.
title Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidance
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12004