Agentic search enables large language models to solve knowledge-intensive tasks by interleaving multi-step reasoning with retrieval, yet optimizing this with outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) provides only sparse supervision. Knowledge distillation can supply denser guidance, and advanced proprietary models with their strong reasoning capabilities are promising teachers. While distilling from proprietary models can densify this supervisory signal, conventional logit-matching is precluded by hidden logits and mismatched tokenizers, whereas raw natural language trajectory imitation transfers superficial stylistic artifacts rather than core reasoning competence. To address the heterogeneous distillation problem and bridge the distribution gap, we propose Multi-Agent Protocol Distillation (MAPD), a joint distillation and RL framework uses a structured, style-normalized protocol as an intermediate representation. An offline multi-agent system (MAS) decomposes each query, retrieves supporting evidence, repairs failed searches, and converts the resulting exploration trace into a JSON protocol containing the task type, reasoning plan, and extractive grounding facts. During training, the protocol is provided only to a privileged branch of the student policy, whose token distributions furnish a dense distillation signal alongside the sparse RL objective. Extensive evaluations across seven QA benchmarks demonstrate that MAPD consistently outperforms competitive distillation and RL, achieving average success rates of 39.4\% on Qwen3-1.7B and 44.4\% on Qwen3-4B. Crucially, the framework generalizes robustly across diverse proprietary teachers while effectively mitigating the student policy from style drift and verbosity degeneration.
Junlin Liu, Jiangwang Chen, Zixin Song et al.· 4 citations
Efficient long-context inference is not only about reducing memory cost, but also about keeping useful contextual evidence accessible as generation proceeds. However, existing compression-oriented approaches, such as key-value (KV) cache compression and context compression, often either make an early decision about which contextual information to keep or rely on an external compressor. Such designs make it difficult to adapt the compressed context to the evidence needed by later reasoning steps. This paper introduces PReM (Preserve and Refresh Memory), a context-compression framework that maintains the long context as the model's internal layer-wise KV memory and learns what to preserve and when to refresh it. Specifically, PReM uses a dedicated memory layer to make memory-selection decisions, and a special memory tokento trigger refreshes during generation. To train this behavior, PReM introduces Phase-Separated Refresh Training, aligning memory selection with memory-conditioned generation while preserving continuity across refreshes. Experiments with 32K-token contexts show that PReM outperforms strong baselines under both 16x and 32x compression, while maintaining a favorable balance between answer quality and inference efficiency.
Bohan Yu, Lei Shen, Chenxi Zhou et al.· 0 citations
ClawTrack is presented, a dual-assessment benchmark that simultaneously measures what an agent achieves (Task Score) and how it achieves it (Process Score) and finds that process scores effectively attribute success and failure to specific reasoning dimensions, filtering lucky passes invisible to outcome-only evaluation.
Xingjian Wu, Xuhan Zhu, Xingchen Liu et al.· 0 citations
Large language model agents have shown strong potential in complex interactive tasks, yet their reinforcement learning (RL) is often hindered by sparse rewards, as a long multi-turn trajectory may receive only a single outcome-level signal. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) provides dense token-level supervision from a privileged teacher, but the teacher may not be reliable at every position. Existing methods commonly rely on isolated token-level discrepancies, which can be sensitive to noise, or assign a shared step-level weight that may overlook positional variation. We propose Persistent Consistency Self-Distillation (PCSD), which derives token-level distillation weights from the local persistence of teacher-favoring signals. PCSD combines adaptive windows with exponentially decayed aggregation to capture persistent relative teacher support, applies trend-aware modulation to attenuate locally declining support, and produces continuous weights through sigmoid gating. The resulting objective is jointly optimized with GRPO, combining dense teacher guidance with sparse environmental feedback. Without inference-time skills, PCSD achieves the best ALFWorld Overall results among all baselines on both backbones, exceeding GRPO by 15.6 and 13.3 points and SDAR by 6.2 and 5.5 points, while remaining competitive on WebShop and gaining 15.8 points over GRPO on unseen ALFWorld split.
Chunji Lv, Yangguang Wei, Junlin Liu et al.· 0 citations
Recent advances in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD). While OPSD provides dense, logit-level supervision, it inherently suffers from exposure bias due to the privileged information of the self-teacher. In multi-turn agentic settings, this leads to reasoning route convergence and the loss of clear optimization directions. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Contrastive Reinforced Policy Optimization (CRPO), which reformulates agentic OPSD from a contrastive learning perspective. By leveraging predictive entropy to distinguish between positive positions (reflective exploration) and negative positions (exposure bias), CRPO conducts group-wise contrast to preserve reliable, fine-grained optimization signals. Extensive evaluations across 13 challenging reasoning and deep-search benchmarks demonstrate that CRPO consistently outperforms existing reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines, significantly enhancing training stability and generalization in long-horizon interactions.
Xingjian Wu, Junlin Liu, Xingchen Liu et al.· 0 citations